Computer Engineering Commons^™

Stereoscopic Avatar Interfaces : A Study To Determine What Effect, If Any, 3d Technology Has At Increasing The Interpretability Of An Avatar's Gaze Into The Real-World, Mark Dunne, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

An approach to displaying avatar interfaces monoscopically such as the Turning, Stretching and Boxing (TSB) technique (a combination of three graphical processes) has been shown to improve the communication efficiency of avatars by increasing a user's ability to interpret an avatar's gaze direction through the delivery of a sustained 3D illusion of the avatar on a standard 2D display. A reasonable question to ask about this approach is whether or not the improvement in interpretability can be matched or surpassed by using a standard 3D display technology (stereoscopic) with or without the fore-mentioned approach? This paper presents an experiment that …

Visqol: The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener, Andrew Hines, Jan Skoglund, Anil Kokaram, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

A model of human speech quality perception has been developed to provide an objective measure for predicting subjective quality assessments. The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener (ViSQOL) model is a signal based full reference metric that uses a spectro-temporal measure of similarity between a reference and a test speech signal. This paper describes the algorithm and compares the results with PESQ for common problems in VoIP: clock drift, associated time warping and jitter. The results indicate that ViSQOL is less prone to underestimation of speech quality in both scenarios than the ITU standard.

Active Learning For Text Classification, Rong Hu

Doctoral

Text classification approaches are used extensively to solve real-world challenges. The success or failure of text classification systems hangs on the datasets used to train them, without a good dataset it is impossible to build a quality system. This thesis examines the applicability of active learning in text classification for the rapid and economical creation of labelled training data. Four main contributions are made in this thesis. First, we present two novel selection strategies to choose the most informative examples for manually labelling. One is an approach using an advanced aggregated confidence measurement instead of the direct output of classifiers …

Productivity Evaluation Of Self-Adaptive Software Model Driven Architecture, Basel Magableh

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and modelling context-dependent functionality and stable description of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabilities of the context-oriented component-based application-model-driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self- adaptive applications; the authors describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the applica- tion requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers modelled an extra-functionality …

Self-Adaptive Application For Indoor Wayfinding For Individuals With Cognitive Impairments, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

This article focuses on describing a Model Driven Archi- tecture (COCA-MDA) approach that facilitates the develop- ment of self-adaptive application for indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments. COCA-MDA pro- vides the following benefits: 1) It enables the architecture to anticipate several behavioural variations based on the context and the specific needs of the individuals with cog- nitive impairments. 2) It enables the application to proac- tively anticipate or reactively address unforeseen changes through support by a dynamic-decision making and policy framework. The policy framework is based on a stable de- scription of software models and proprieties. 3) It can …

Model-Driven Productivity Evaluation For Self-Adaptive Context-Oriented Software Development, Basel Magableh, Stephen Barrett

Articles

Anticipating context changes using a model-based approach requires a formal procedure for analysing and mod- elling their context-dependent functionality, and a stable descrip- tion of the architecture which supports dynamic decision-making and architecture evolution. This article demonstrates the capabil- ities of the context-oriented component-based application-model- driven architecture (COCA-MDA) to support the development of self-adaptive applications; we describe a state-of-the-art case study and evaluate the development effort involved in adopting the COCA-MDA in constructing the application. An intensive analysis of the application requirements simplified the process of modelling the application’s behavioural model; therefore, instead of modelling several variation models, the developers …

An Investigation Of Data Protection And Computer Security In Small Irish Medical Practices, Sean Mcgrath

Dissertations

Small medical practices store and process the health information of their patients in order to aid in providing care to them. Because of this a level of trust exists between the patients and the practice to ensure the sensitive medical data is kept private and secure. There was no formalised way to test if this trust was well deserved and what level of protection was applied to such sensitive health records. A security model that is applicable to small medical practices for the purpose of protecting and securing the personal health information they store was constructed and validated by a …

Performance Analysis And Assessment Of A Tf-Idf Based Archetype-Snomed-Ct Binding Algorithm, Sheng Yu, Jesus Bisbal, Damon Berry

Conference Papers

Term bindings in archetypes are at a boundary between health information models and health terminology for dual model-based electronic health-care record (EHR) systems. The development of archetypes and the population of archetypes with bound terms is in its infancy. Terminological binding is currently performed “manually” by the teams who create archetypes. This process could be made more efficient, if it was supported by automatic tools. This paper presents a method for evaluating the performance of automatic code search approaches. In order to assess the quality of the automatic search, the authors extracted all the unique bound codes from 1133 archetypes …

Measuring Design Metrics In Websites, Emilio Navarro, Ronan Fitzpatrick

Conference papers

The current state of the World Wide Web demands website designs that engage consumers in order to allow them to consume services or generate leads to maximize revenue. This paper describes a software quality factor to measure the success of websites by analyzing web design structure and not relying only on websites traffic data. It is also documents the requirements and architecture to build a software tool that measures criteria for determining Engagibility. A new set of social criteria to be measured for current website philosophy is also proposed.

Intelligibility Of Electrolarynx Speech Using A Novel Hands-Free Actuator, Brian Madden, Mark Nolan, Ted Burke, James Condron, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

During voiced speech, the larynx provides quasi-periodic acoustic excitation of the vocal tract. In most electrolarynxes, mechanical vibrations are produced by a linear electromechanical actuator, the armature of which percusses against a metal or plastic plate at a frequency within the range of glottal excitation. In this paper, the intelligibility of speech produced using a novel hands-free actuator is compared to speech produced using a conventional electrolarynx. Two able-bodied speakers (one male, one female) performed a closed response test containing 28 monosyllabic words, once using a conventional electrolarynx and a second time using the novel design. The resulting audio recordings …

Augmented Control Of A Hands-Free Electrolarynx, Brian Madden, James Condron, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

During voiced speech, the larynx acts as the sound source, providing a quasi-periodic excitation of the vocal tract. Following a total laryngectomy, some people speak using an electrolarynx which employs an electromechanical actuator to perform the excitatory function of the absent larynx. Drawbacks of conventional electrolarynx designs include the monotonic sound emitted, the need for a free-hand to operate the device, and the difficulty experienced by many laryngectomees in adapting to its use. One improvement to the electrolarynx, which clinicians and users frequently suggest, is the provision of a convenient hands-free control facility. This would allow more natural use of …

On The Applications Of Deterministic Chaos For Encrypting Data On The Cloud, Jonathan Blackledge, Nikolai Ptitsyn

Conference papers

Cloud computing is expected to grow considerably in the future because it has so many advantages with regard to sale and cost, change management, next generation architectures, choice and agility. However, one of the principal concerns for users of the Cloud is lack of control and above all, data security. This paper considers an approach to encrypting information before it is ‘placed’ on the Cloud where each user has access to their own encryption algorithm, an algorithm that is based on a set of iterated function systems that outputs a chaotic number stream, designed to produce a cryptographically secure cipher. …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …

On Improving Electrooculogram-Based Computer Mouse Systems: The Accelerometer Trigger, Johnalan Keegan, Edward Burke, James Condron, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

Eye tracking is a well-established method of computer control for profoundly paralysed people (Anson et al., 2002). Cameras are commonly used to track eye movements (Morimoto et al., 2005) but one alternative is the bioelectrical signal known as the electrooculogram (EOG). There are some EOG mouse control systems that facilitate the use of GUI applications, but certain actions, which are straightforward using a conventional mouse, remain impossible. Unless the eyes are tracking a target, they move in saccades (jumps), making it impossible to voluntarily trace out smooth trajectories with one's gaze, as would be required to draw a smooth curve. …

Detecting The Onset Of Dementia Using Context-Oriented Architecture, Basel Magableh, Nidal Albeiruti

Articles

In the last few years, Aspect Oriented Software De- velopment (AOSD) and Context Oriented Software Development (COSD) have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to employ the principle of the separation of concerns, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Component-based Software Development (CBSD) for building high quality of software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the adaptability, and dependability of software systems. COSD, has emerged as a generic devel- opment paradigm towards …

Accessible Rich Internet Applications: The Search Engine Challenge, Angela Kielthy

Conference papers

The perception that Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIAs) are inaccessible to search engines is perhaps one of the main factors that hinder their wider adoption by the web development community. Recent announcements that RIAs and ARIAs are becoming more search engine friendly is provoking web developers to look for further information and evidence that will support or refute these announcements.

This paper outlines research undertaken and tests performed to establish if RIAs and ARIAs developed using Adobe Flex are crawlable and indexable by the Google search engine by default.

The conclusion drawn from testing is …

Simulated Performance Intensity Functions, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

Measuring speech intelligibility for different hearing aid fitting methods in a simulated environment would allow rapid prototyping and early design assessment. A simulated performance intensity function (SPIF) test methodology has been developed to allow experimentation using an auditory nerve model to predict listeners’ phoneme recognition. The test discriminates between normal hearing and progressively degrading levels of sensorineural hearing loss. Auditory nerve discharge patterns, presented as neurograms, can be subjectively ranked by visual inspection. Here, subjective inspection is substituted with an automated ranking using a new image quality metric that can quantify neurogram degradation in a consistent manner. This work reproduces …

Comparing Hearing Aid Algorithm Performance Using Simulated Performance Intensity Functions, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

Simulated performance intensity functions were used to quantitatively discriminate speech intelligibility through phoneme discrimination assessment. Listener test results for subjects with a wide range of sensorineural hearing losses were simulated using an auditory nerve model and compared to real listeners' unaided and aided performance. Simulations of NAL-RP and DSL 4.0 fitting algorithms were compared. Auditory nerve discharge patterns from the model were presented as neurograms. An automated ranking process was used to quantify neurogram degradation using a new measure, the Neurogram Similarity Index Measure (NSIM). The measure has previously been shown to correlate well in predictions of phoneme discrimination for …

Application Of Stochastic Diffusion For Hiding High Fidelity Encrypted Images, Jonathan Blackledge, Abdulrahman Al-Rawi

Articles

Cryptography coupled with information hiding has received increased attention in recent years and has become a major research theme because of the importance of protecting encrypted information in any Electronic Data Interchange system in a way that is both discrete and covert. One of the essential limitations in any cryptography system is that the encrypted data provides an indication on its importance which arouses suspicion and makes it vulnerable to attack. Information hiding of Steganography provides a potential solution to this issue by making the data imperceptible, the security of the hidden information being a threat only if its existence …

Attitudes Of Health Professionals To Electronic Data Sharing Within An Integrated Care Electronic Health Record (Icehr), Charyl O'Malley, Damon Berry, Mary Sharp

Conference Papers

It is estimated that 98,000 people die in hospitals yearly in the USA as a result of medical errors (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2009). Electronic Health Records (EHR) can offer improved patient safety. EHRs are being implemented by many countries, however, not all health professionals have welcomed them (MORI Social Research Institute, 2006). As outlined in the National Health Information Strategy (NHIS) document, Ireland has plans to introduce an EHR. Attitudes of health professionals are a significant factor for the successful implementation and adoption of a new clinical information system. This study aimed to gauge the attitude of …

A Quiet Success Story In The Laboratory: Survey Of 30 Implementations Of The Astm 1394 Standard For Analyser Interfaces, Brian Markey, Damon Berry

Conference Papers

In 1991 the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) introduced the first version of a standard called ASTM E1394-91 for communication between centralised clinical analysers and host systems. For nearly 20 years this low key standard has been used as the basis for analyser host communications. A minor revision of the standard (ASTM1394-97) was published in 1998. This work gives a brief summary of the development of lab messages that led to the introduction and continued use of the standard. The authors also present a review and preliminary analysis of 30 implementations of ASTM E1394. The authors investigated 30 …

A Numerical Methodology To Fully Elucidate The Altered Wall Shear Stress In A Stented Coronary Artery, Jonathan Murphy, Fergal Boyle

Articles

Arterial restenosis after coronary stenting is caused by excessive tissue growth which is stimulated by arterial injury and alterations to the hemodynamic wall shear stress (WSS). Recent numerical studies have predicted only minor differences in the altered WSS between different stent designs using a commonly employed threshold assessment technique. While it is possible that there are only minor differences, it is more likely that this assessment technique is incapable of fully elucidating the alterations to the WSS created by stent implantation. This paper proposes a methodology that involves a more complete investigation into the stentinduced alterations of WSS by incorporating …

A Similarity Matrix For Irish Traditional Dance Music, Padraic Lavin

Dissertations

It is estimated that there are between seven and ten thousand Irish traditional dance tunes in existence. As Irish musicians travelled the world they carried their repertoire in their memories and rarely recorded these pieces in writing. When the music was passed down from generation to generation by ear the names of these pieces of music and the melodies themselves were forgotten or changed over time. This has led to problems for musicians and archivists when identifying the names of traditional Irish tunes.

Almost all of this music is now available in ABC notation from online collections. An ABC file …

Mirthconnect Howto Document, Sebastien Pardon, Damon Berry

Reports

This document aims at describing the steps involved in installing and configuring Mirth Connect so as to produce an EN13606-compliant record extract from an HL7v2 message using the LinkedEHR- produced xquery.

Cloud Computing:Strategies For Cloud Computing Adoption, Faith Shimba

Dissertations

The advent of cloud computing in recent years has sparked an interest from different organisations, institutions and users to take advantage of web applications. This is a result of the new economic model for the Information Technology (IT) department that cloud computing promises. The model promises a shift from an organisation required to invest heavily for limited IT resources that are internally managed, to a model where the organisation can buy or rent resources that are managed by a cloud provider, and pay per use. Cloud computing also promises scalability of resources and on-demand availability of resources.

Although, the adoption …

A Cross-Layer Modification To The Dsr Routing Protocol In Wireless Mesh Networks, Mustafa Ramadhan

Doctoral

A cross-layer modification to the DSR routing protocol that finds high throughput paths in WMNs has been introduced in this work. The Access Efficiency Factor (AEF) has been introduced in this modification as a local congestion avoidance metric for the DSR routing mechanism as an alternative to the hop count (Hc) metric. In this modification, the selected path is identified by finding a path with the highest minimum AEF (max_min_AEF) value. The basis of this study is to compare the performance of the Hc and max_min_AEF as routing metrics for the DSR protocol in WMNs using the OPNET modeler. Performance …

Cloud Computing For Schools, Shane O'Doherty

Dissertations

This project evaluates previous Information and Communication Technology policy and practice relating to primary schools in Ireland with a view to suggesting a better way forward in light of advances in ICT, such as the availability of fast broadband services, including fibre broadband, browser-based applications and the advent of cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to the Internet as a source of both software programs and also data retention, in effect the Internet provides the software and data services via browsers to users who may remain entirely unaware of the technology at work, uncluttered by hardware or software licensing issues or …

Suitable Knowledge Management In Project Environment, Taya Polyaninova

Dissertations

Knowledge is becoming one of the main assets for organizations that want to improve their competitiveness in currently changing market. Knowledge comes from different sources within organizations, such as internal processes, projects, customers and stakeholder information. As markets and the way of doing things changes, many companies implement different projects to deal with those changes, which leads to accumulation of knowledge and information. Companies use Knowledge Management to create, identify and distribute knowledge and experiences arising from projects within organisation. However, as projects are done to create unique deliverables and they are never the same, there is a difficulty in …

A Web And Mobile System For Environmental Decision Support, James Carswell, Keith Gardiner, Michela Bertolotto, Andrea Rizzine

Books/Book chapters

Current field data collection methods for many of today’s scientific and other observer/monitor type applications are still entrenched in the “clipboard age”, requiring manual data transcription to a database management system at some (often much) later date, and only allows for visualisation and analysis of recently captured field data “back in the lab”. This chapter is targeted at progressing today’s pen & paper methodology into the spatially enabled mobile computing age of realtime multi-media data input, integration, visualisation, and analysis simultaneously both in the field and the lab. The system described is customized to the specific needs of the Canadian …

Healthcare Professional Roles: The Ontology Model For E-Learning, Lorraine Carmody, Elizabeth Sherry, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

The paper aims to present the MEDeLEARN project, an ontology-driven virtual learning environment for Medical Information System training. The current training environment for healthcare professionals in the use of essential medical information systems in a large urban training hospital is based on conventional instructor-led training sessions. Problems arise due to the demanding nature of the hospital working environment, causing training to be cancelled or curtailed. This mode of training delivery is deemed to be inefficient and ineffective, with the danger of serious errors occurring as a consequence.

The project investigates whether a virtual learning environment can address the competency gap …