Engineering Commons^™

Polar Exploration (University Focus) Research Into Smart Materials Continues At The University Of Dublin With The Development Of Methods To Record And Present Data To Demonstrate The Magnetorheological Effect When A Magnetic Field Is Applied To A Mr Elastomer Sample, Dave Gorman, Niall Murphy, Ray Ekins

Conference Papers

Research into methods to record and present data to demonstrate the Magnetorheological effect when a magnetic field is applied to a Magnetorheological Elastomer sample. By Dave Gorman, Niall Murphy and Ray Ekins, Technological University Dublin, Republic of Ireland A Magnetorheological Elastomer (MRE) is an example of a smart material as it undergoes a change in its physical properties when in the presece of an external magnetic field. This change in properties is known as the Magnetorheological (MR) effect and the manner in which it is achieved and reported, is of critical importance to the future development of MRE-based components. To …

Design And Planned Obsolescence. Theories And Approaches For Designing Enabling Technologies, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

Articles

We are currently living in a decade where smart objects and Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices are becoming part of daily life in different contexts. This research seeks to investigate and verify, by using a formal literature review methodology, the most visible aspects of technological development, within the Industry 4.0 and IoT scenario, in relation to the theories of the so called “Planned Obsolescence”.

This study covers a defined number of works on Design theories and practices on how to face the issue of built-in obsolescence of devices in the era of the Connected Devices. The majority of the works …

The Use Of Persistent Explorer Artificial Ants To Solve The Car Sequencing Problem, Kieran O'Sullivan

Dissertations

Ant Colony Optimisation is a widely researched meta-heuristic which uses the behaviour and pheromone laying activities of foraging ants to find paths through graphs. Since the early 1990’s this approach has been applied to problems such as the Travelling Salesman Problem, Quadratic Assignment Problem and Car Sequencing Problem to name a few. The ACO is not without its problems it tends to find good local optima and not good global optima. To solve this problem modifications have been made to the original ACO such as the Max Min ant system. Other solutions involve combining it with Evolutionary Algorithms to improve …

Chaos-Based Encryption Keys And Neural Key-Store For Cloud-Hosted Data Confidentiality, N.N Mosola, M.T Dlamini, Jonathan Blackledge, J.H.P Eloff, H.S Venter

Conference papers

Cloud computing brings flexible and cost-effective services. However, security concerns plague the cloud. Data confidentiality is one of the security concerns inhibiting the adoption of cloud computing. This concern stems from various cyberattacks directed towards gaining unauthorised access to cloud-bound or cloud-hosted data. This paper proposes a clientend encryption and key management system to curb cyberattacks that target compromising data confidentiality on the cloud.

Can Deep Learning Techniques Improve The Risk Adjusted Returns From Enhanced Indexing Investment Strategies, Anthony Grace

Dissertations

Deep learning techniques have been widely applied in the field of stock market prediction particularly with respect to the implementation of active trading strategies. However, the area of portfolio management and passive portfolio management in particular has been much less well served by research to date. This research project conducts an investigation into the science underlying the implementation of portfolio management strategies in practice focusing on enhanced indexing strategies. Enhanced indexing is a passive management approach which introduces an element of active management with the aim of achieving a level of active return through small adjustments to the portfolio weights. …

Teaching Professional Skills In Engineering Programmes: The Academic Perspective, Una Beagon

Other resources

My interest in preparing engineering students for a successful career in industry stems from personal experience of recruiting, mentoring and managing graduates in civil and structural engineering consultancies. The range of skills, abilities and values of each graduate was varied, and it became apparent that academic achievement, whilst important, was not the defining skill for achieving early responsibility or promotion within the company. More often, the graduate who could communicate well and self-direct his/her work was given more responsibility and opportunity.

The intent in this paper is to present a plan for a PhD research study in order to elicit …

Can A Strictly Defined Security Configuration For Iot Devices Mitigate The Risk Of Exploitation By Botnet Malware?, David Kennefick

Dissertations

The internet that we know and use every day is the internet of people, a collection of knowledge and data that can be accessed anywhere is the world anytime from many devices. The internet of the future is the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is a collection of automated technology that is designed to be run autonomously, but on devices designed for humans to use. In 2016 the Mirai malware has shown there are underlying vulnerabilities in devices connected to the internet of things. Mirai is specifically designed to recognise and exploit IoT devices and it has been …

An Analysis Of Predicting Job Titles Using Job Descriptions, John Lynch

Dissertations

A job title is an all-encompassing very short form description that conveys all of the pertinent information relating to a job. The job title typically encapsulates - and should encapsulate - the domain, role and level of responsibility of any given job. Significant value is attached to job titles both internally within organisational structures and to individual job holders. Organisations map out all employees in an organogram on the basis of job titles. This has a bearing on issues like salary, level and scale of responsibility, employee selection and so on. Employees draw value from their own job titles as …

Cybercrime: An Investigation Of The Attitudes And Environmental Factors That Make People More Willing To Participate In Online Crime, Dearbhail Kirwan

Dissertations

Cybercrime incidence rates are increasing. In order to identify solutions to this problem, the sources of cybercrime need to be identified. This research attempted to identify a potential set of circumstances that create an environment in which people are more likely to engage in cybercrime. There are three aspects to this; (1) Behaviour on the internet – Are people more likely to engage in illicit activities online than in the physical world? (2) Crime Perceptions – Do people perceive cybercrime as being less serious than non-cybercrime? (3) Resources on the Internet – Are people aware of the types of free …

“How Short Is A Piece Of String?”: An Investigation Into The Impact Of Text Length On Short-Text Classification Accuracy, Austin Mccartney

Dissertations

The recent increase in the widespread use of short messages, for example micro-blogs or SMS communications, has created an opportunity to harvest a vast amount of information through machine-based classification. However, traditional classification methods have failed to produce accuracies comparable to those obtained from similar classification of longer texts. Several approaches have been employed to extend traditional methods to overcome this problem, including the enhancement of the original texts through the construction of associations with external data enrichment sources, ranging from thesauri and semantic nets such as Wordnet, to pre-built online taxonomies such as Wikipedia. Other avenues of investigation have …

Bs News September/October

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Spatial Thinking In The Engineering Curriculum: An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Problem Solving And Spatial Skills Among Engineering Students., Gavin Duffy

Doctoral

Long considered a primary factor of intelligence, spatial ability has been shown to correlate strongly with success in engineering education, yet is rarely included as a learning outcome in engineering programmes. A clearer understanding of how and why spatial ability impacts on performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects would allow educators to determine if spatial skills development merits greater priority in STEM curricula. The aim of this study is to help inform that debate by shedding new light on the role of spatial thinking in STEM learning and allow teaching practice and curriculum design to be informed …

Bim+Blockchain: A Solution To The Trust Problem In Collaboration?, Malachy Mathews, Dan Robles, Brian Bowe

Conference papers

This paper provides an overview of historic and current organizational limitations emerging in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Building Owner / Operations (AECOO) Industry. It then provides an overview of new technologies that attempt to mitigate these limitations. However, these technologies, taken together, appear to be converging and creating entirely new organizational structures in the AEC industries. This may be characterized by the emergence of what is called the Network Effect and it’s related calculus. This paper culminates with an introduction to Blockchain Technology (BT) and it’s integration with the emergence of groundbreaking technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial …

Analysis Of Traffic Collisions In Dublin Using Gis Based System, Jagteshwar Singh, Niamh O' Reilly

Conference papers

This study aims to analyse traffic collisions in the Greater Dublin Region between the period 2006-2012, using GIS to identify hotspots and examine the relationship between collisions and a range of contributory factors including vehicular speeds, traffic volume, road curvature, road category and distance from intersection that could enable prediction of traffic collisions. To this end, Road Safety Authority (RSA) collision data for Dublin Region geocoded as point events, road profiles, traffic flow characteristics on which these occur are spatially merged using ArcGIS and FME software to establish if a significant relationship exists between collision frequencies on road links and …

Incremental Joint Modelling For Dialogue State Tracking, Anh Duong Trinh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Dialogue State Tracking is an important task in dialogue management as it provides a mechanism to monitor dialogue contributions. In this paper we introduce an Incremental Joint Model as a new approach to the task. Our tracker is capable of incrementally tracking Dialogue States. We base our model and analysis on the datasets provided in the Second Dialogue State Tracking Challenge (DSTC2). Our early stage evaluations are based on comparisons of our tracker with both the baseline model provide by the DSTC2 and also LecTrack: a state-of-the-art incremental LSTM-based tracker. The main finding of our experiments is that moving from …

An Evaluation Of The Efficiency Of Compartmented Alginate Fibres Encapsulating Rejuvenator As Asphalt Pavement Healing System, Amir Tabakovic, Luke Schuyffel, Aleksandar Karac, Erik Schlangen

Articles

This paper explores the potential methods for evaluating a healing system for asphalt pavements. The healing system under investigation involves compartmented calcium-alginate fibres encapsulating an asphalt binder healing agent (rejuvenator). This system presents a novel method of incorporating rejuvenators into asphalt pavement mixtures. The compartmented fibres are used to distribute the rejuvenator throughout the pavement mixture, thereby overcoming some of the problems associated with alternate asphalt pavement healing methods, i.e., spherical capsules and hollow fibres. The asphalt healing efficiency methods to be evaluated in this paper include: (i) standard test methods for asphalt pavements, such as the Indirect Tensile Strength …

The Impact Of Power Curve Estimation On Commercial Wind Power Forecasts - An Empirical Analysis, Gianni Goretti, Aidan Duffy, Tek Tjing Lie

Conference papers

An increasing number of utilities participating in the energy market require short term (i.e. up to 48 hours) power forecasts for renewable generation in order to optimize technical and financial performances. As a result, a large number of forecast providers now operate in the marketplace, each using different methods and offering a wide range of services. This paper assesses five different day-ahead wind power forecasts generated by various service providers currently operating in the market, and compares their performance against the state-of-the-art of short-term wind power forecasting. The work focuses on how power curve estimations can introduce systematic errors that …

Iot Based Recipes For Enabling Senior Citizens: Stakeholders Views On How Integration Of Iot And Web Services Can Enhance Well-Being And Inclusion Of Older People, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry, John Mcgrory

Conference papers

The main body of research clearly highlights the world’s population is rapidly expanding. When this fact is combined with the increase in life longevity due to medical and social advances it alters the demographic balance in relation to age. Hence, the number of people aged 65 and over is constantly increasing. The potential of Smart Technologies and IoT-based devices to improve health has increased rapidly in the last few years and users are now in a position to contribute to the development of the interaction process and need to be properly trained on benefits of using new technologies. IFTTT (If …

Bim Innovation Capability Programme Of Ireland, Barry Mcauley, Alan Hore, Roger West

Conference papers

The Irish Government has requested that Enterprise Ireland, an organisation responsible for the development and growth of Irish enterprises in world markets to actively promote the use of BIM in Ireland. This promotion has taken the form of an opportunity for Enterprise Ireland clients to apply for a grant under their BIM Enable and BIM Implementation schemes and also through their funding of the BIM Innovation Capability Programme (BICP) of Ireland. The BICP is a two-year project (2016-2018) which seeks to capture the capability of the Irish Construction Industry and the Higher Education Institutes to respond to the increased requirement …

Magnetic Field Sensor Based On A Combination Of A Microfiber Coupler Covered With Magnetic Fluid And A Sagnac Loop, Fangfang Wei, Arun Mallik, Dejun Liu, Qiang Wu, Gang-Ding Peng, Gerald Farrell, Yuliya Semenova

Articles

This paper proposes a novel magnetic field sensor based on a microfiber coupler (MFC) combined with a magnetic fluid (MF) in a Sagnac loop formed from a polarization maintaining fiber (PMF). Thanks to the small (~2.6μm) waist diameter of the MFC, the resulting interference is strongly influenced by the presence of the MF and this leads to the desirable high sensitivity of the structure to the applied magnetic field. The maximum magnetic field sensitivities of −100pm/mT and −488pm/mT have been experimentally demonstrated with the PMF lengths of 75cm and 20cm respectively in the range of magnetic field strengths from 0 …

Bs News July/August

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Key Inference From Irish Traditional Music Scores And Recordings, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present techniques and results for identifying the key of Irish traditional music melodies, or tunes. Several corpora are used, consisting of both symbolic and audio representations. Monophonic and heterophonic recordings are present in the audio datasets. Some particularities of Irish traditional music are discussed, notably its modal nature. New key-profiles are defined, that are better suited to Irish music.

A Hardware One-Time Pad Prototype Generator For Localising Cloud Security, Paul Tobin, Lee Tobin, Michael Mckeever, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

In this paper, we examine a system for encrypting data before storing in the Cloud. Adopting this system gives excellent security to stored data and complete control for accessing data by the client at different locations. The motivation for developing this personal encryption came about because of poor Cloud security and doubts over the safety of public encryption algorithms which might contain backdoors. However, side-channel attacks and other unwanted third-party interventions in Cloud security, probably contribute more to the poor security record history. These factors led to the development of a prototype for personalising security locally which defeats cryptanalysis. The …

Chaos-Based Cryptography For Cloud Computing, Paul Tobin, Lee Tobin, Michael Mckeever, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

Cloud computing and poor security issues have quadrupled over the last six years and with the alleged presence of backdoors in common encryption ciphers, has created a need for personalising the encryption process by the client. In 2007, two Microsoft employees gave a presentation ``On the Possibility of a backdoor in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Elliptic Curve Pseudo Random Number Generators'' and was linked in 2013 by the New York Times with notes leaked by Edward Snowden. This confirmed backdoors were placed, allegedly, in a number of encryption systems by the National Security Agency, which if true creates an urgent …

One-To-Cloud One-Time Pad Data Encryption: Introducing Virtual Prototyping With Pspice, Paul Tobin, Lee Tobin, Roberto Gandia Blanquer Dr, Michael Mckeever, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

In this paper, we examine the design and application of a one-time pad encryption system for protecting data stored in the Cloud. Personalising security using a one-time pad generator at the client-end protects data from break-ins, side-channel attacks and backdoors in public encryption algorithms. The one-time pad binary sequences were obtained from modified analogue chaos oscillators initiated by noise and encoded client data locally. Specific ``one-to-Cloud'' storage applications returned control back to the end user but without the key distribution problem normally associated with one-time pad encryption. Development of the prototype was aided by ``Virtual Prototyping'' in the latest version …

A Comparative Analysis Of Pretreatment Strategies On The Properties And Hydrolysis Of Brewers’ Spent Grain, Rajeev Ravindran, Swarna Jaiswal, Nissreen Abu-Ghannam, Amit Jaiswal

Articles

In this study, brewer’s spent grain (BSG) was subjected to a range pretreatments to study the effect on reducing sugar yield. Glucose and xylose were found to be the predominant sugars in BSG. Brewers spent grain was high in cellulose (19.21g/100g of BSG) and lignin content (30.84g/100g of BSG). Microwave assisted alkali (MAA) pretreatment was found to be the most effective pretreatment for BSG, where the pretreatment was conducted at 400W for 60s. A maximum reducing yield was observed with high biomass loading (1g/10ml), cellulase (158.76 μl/10ml), hemicellulase (153.3 μl/10ml), pH (5.4) and an incubation time (120h). Upon enzymatic hydrolysis, …

Auto Generation Of Xliff Translation Documents From Proprietary File Formats, Kieran O'Connor, Geraldine Gray

The ITB Journal

The handling of proprietary documents by localisation vendors is time consuming and error prone, and represents a significant challenge to localisation projects. Vendors with many customers, each with its own set of document formats, must potentially support a document format set numbering in the hundreds or thousands. This paper describes an approach to automating the extraction of translatable text from a variety of file formats. The solution is based on XLIFF, language parsers, and XML transformations.

Implementing Test Patterns To Dynamically Assess Internet Response For Potential Voip Sessions Between Sip Peers, Declan Barber

The ITB Journal

The capability of VoIP to provide internet telephony is limited by the lack of homogeneous quality of service (QoS) mechanisms in the Internet. Whereas approaches which reserve QoS resources will work well in an end-to-end managed environment, they are not automatically suited to the heterogeneous nature of the Internet. It may be possible to adopt the 'chirp-sounder' approach uses in establishing the optimal frequency channel for a high frequency (HF) radio transmission which dynamically samples a range of possible transmission channels and uses the echoing of a an established test pattern to ascertain the quality of the potential links. The …

Developing Real-Time Multimedia Conferencing Services Using Java And Sip, Gavin Byrne, Declan Barber

The ITB Journal

This paper examines Java's suitability in creating real-time multimedia communications-based applications in Next Generation Networks (NGNs). We investigate some of the current enabling technologies provided by the Java plaiform which are concerned with the rapid development of realtime communications-based products and services. In particular, we look at creating a multiparty conferencing and collaboration service using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the JAIN Framework and present an approach which models multiparty conferencing applications by separating signaling and media transfer functionality. We map our model through the design stage to an implementation in Java. This paper is based on real experiences …

Web Enabled Embedded Devices, Anthony Keane, Brian Myler

The ITB Journal

The trend in manufacturing of computerised control systems has been to miniaturise the components while increasing the functionality of the systems. This has led to the development of small inexpensive hand-held computer devices coupled with the availability of a user friendly application development language, Java and public cost-effect communication networks has given the developer a programmable web-enabled embedded device. This paper investigates the steps involved in programming the Tiny InterNet Interface platform and analyses the limitations imposed by miniaturisation on this device.