Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Agile Implementation Within A Medical Device Software Organisation, Martin Mchugh, Fergal Mc Caffery, Garret Coady

Conference papers

Three surveys conducted over a 6 year period revealed that medical device software organisations have difficulties in the area of requirements management, namely accommodating changes in requirements. Medical device software is traditionally developed in accordance with a plan driven software development lifecycle (SDLC). These SDLCs are rigid and inflexible to changes once the requirements management stage has been completed. Agile methods are gaining momentum in non-regulated industries but as of yet, the adoption of these methods in regulated industries such as the medical device software domain remains low. This study presents an implementation of agile methods within a medical device …

The Role Of Emotional And Facial Expression In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars, Robert G Smith

Other Resources

This thesis explores the role that underlying emotional facial expressions might have in regards to understandability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish Sign Language (ISL), we examine the Deaf community’s requirement for a visual-gestural language as well as some linguistic attributes of ISL which we consider fundamental to this research. Unlike spoken language, visual-gestural languages such as ISL have no standard written representation. Given this, we compare current methods of written representation for signed languages as we consider: which, if any, is the most suitable transcription method for the medical receptionist dialogue corpus. A growing body of work …

Multi-Valued Argumentation Frameworks, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

In this paper we explore how the seminal Dung’s abstract argumentation framework can be extended to handle arguments containing gradual concepts. We allow arguments to have a degree of truth associated with them and we investigate the degree of truth to which each argument can be considered accepted, rejected and undecided by an abstract argumentation semantics. We propose a truth-compositional recursive computation, and we discuss examples using the major multi-valued logics such as Godel’s, Zadeh’s and Łukasiewicz's logic. The findings are a contribution in the field of non-monotonic approximate reasoning and they also represent a well-grounded proposal towards the introduction …

Entropy, Information, Landauer’S Limit And Moore’S Law, Paul Tobin, Jonathan Blackledge

Conference papers

In this paper we explore the link between information and entropy by considering the infamous Maxwell demon thought experiment. A non-rigorous mathematical solution by Le´o Szil´ard established this link for the first time, as did Claude Shannon nineteen years later. In 1961, Rolf Landauer’s mathematical solution resulted in the Landauer limit, which is still being hotly debated, but here we discuss the implication of this limit on Moore’s law and future growth in computing power. A workaround the limit is proposed using an Analogue Artificial Neural Network (AANN). Here, we mimic the action of a human brain synapse formed from …

Dynamic Estimation Of Rater Reliability Using Multi-Armed Bandits, Alexey Tarasov

Doctoral

One of the critical success factors for supervised machine learning is the quality of target values, or predictions, associated with training instances. Predictions can be discrete labels (such as a binary variable specifying whether a blog post is positive or negative) or continuous ratings (for instance, how boring a video is on a 10-point scale). In some areas, predictions are readily available, while in others, the eort of human workers has to be involved. For instance, in the task of emotion recognition from speech, a large corpus of speech recordings is usually available, and humans denote which emotions are present …

Adopting Agile Practices When Developing Software For Use In The Medical Domain, Martin Mchugh, Fergal Mccaffery, Valentine Casey

Articles

Non-safety critical software developers have been reaping the benefits of adopting agile practices for a number of years. However, developers of safety critical software often have concerns about adopting agile practices. Through performing a literature review, this research has identified the perceived barriers to following agile practices when developing medical device software. A questionnaire based survey was also conducted with medical device software developers in Ireland to determine the barriers to adopting agile practices. The survey revealed that half of the respondents develop software in accordance with a plan driven software development lifecycle and that they believe that there are …

Investigating Automatic Measurements Of Prosodic Accommodation And Its Dynamics In Social Interaction, Celine De Looze, Stefan Scherer, Brian Vaughan, Nick Campbell

Articles

Spoken dialogue systems are increasingly being used to facilitate and enhance human communication. While these interactive systems can process the linguistic aspects of human communication, they are not yet capable of processing the complex dynamics involved in social interaction, such as the adaptation on the part of interlocutors. Providing interactive systems with the capacity to process and exhibit this accommodation could however improve their efficiency and make machines more socially-competent interactants.

At present, no automatic system is available to process prosodic accommodation, nor do any clear measures exist that quantify its dynamic manifestation. While it can be observed to be …

Computer-Aided Assessment For Computer Science Students, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, Brian Keegan

Other resources

No abstract provided.

H-Index For Quantifying The Fractal Or Scaling Structure Of Geographic Features, Bin Jiang, Junjun Yin

Articles

Although geographic features, such as mountains and coastlines, are fractal, some studies have claimed that the fractal property is not universal. This claim, which is dubious, is mainly attributed to the strict definition of fractal dimension as a measure or index for characterizing the complexity of fractals. In this article, we propose an alternative, ht-index, to quantify the fractal or scaling structure of geographic features. A geographic feature has ht-index (h) if the pattern of far more small things than large ones recurs (h – 1) times at different scales. The higher the ht-index, the more complex …

Evaluation Of A Substitution Method For Idiom Transformation In Statistical Machine Translation, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

We evaluate a substitution based technique for improving Statistical Machine Translation performance on idiomatic multiword expressions. The method operates by performing substitution on the original idiom with its literal meaning before translation, with a second substitution step replacing literal meanings with idioms following translation. We detail our approach, outline our implementation and provide an evaluation of the method for the language pair English/Brazilian-Portuguese. Our results show improvements in translation accuracy on sentences containing either morphosyntactically constrained or unconstrained idioms. We discuss the consequences of our results and outline potential extensions to this process.

An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Idioms On Phrase Based Statistical Machine Translation Of English To Brazilian-Portuguese, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper describes an experiment to evaluate the impact of idioms on Statis- tical Machine Translation (SMT) process using the language pair English/Brazilian- Portuguese. Our results show that on sen- tences containing idioms a standard SMT system achieves about half the BLEU score of the same system when applied to sentences that do not contain idioms. We also provide a short error analysis and out- line our planned work to overcome this limitation.

Towards A Computational Analysis Of Probabilistic Argumentation Frameworks, Pierpaolo Dondio

Articles

In this paper we analyze probabilistic argumentation frameworks (PAFs), defined as an extension of Dung abstract argumentation frameworks in which each argument n is asserted with a probability p(n). The debate around PAFs has so far centered on their theoretical definition and basic properties. This work contributes to their computational analysis by proposing a first recursive algorithm to compute the probability of acceptance of each argument under grounded and preferred semantics, and by studying the behavior of PAFs with respect to reinstatement, cycles and changes in argument structure. The computational tools proposed may provide strategic information for agents selecting the …

Exploring Customer Specific Kpi Selection Strategies For An Adaptive Time Critical User Interface, Ingo Keck, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Rapid growth in the number of measures available to describe customer-organization relationships has presented a serious challenge for Business Intelligence (BI) interface developers as they attempt to provide business users with key customer information without requiring users to painstakingly sift through many interface windows and layers. In this paper we introduce a prototype Intelligent User Interface that we have deployed to partially address this issue. The interface builds on machine learning techniques to construct a ranking model of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used to select and present the most important customer metrics that can be made available to …

Computing Trust As A Form Of Presumptive Reasoning, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo

Conference papers

This study describes and evaluates a novel trust model for a range of collaborative applications. The model assumes that humans routinely chose to trust their peers by relying on few recurrent presumptions, which are domain independent and that form a recognisable trust expertise. We refer to these presumptions as trust schemes, the specialised version of Walton’s argumentation schemes. Experimental evidence is provided about trust schemes efficacy with a detailed experiment over an online community of 80.000 members. Results show how proposed trust schemes are more effective in trust computation when they are combined together and when their plausibility in the …

Defeasible Reasoning And Argument-Based Systems In Medical Fields: An Informal Overview, Luca Longo, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

The first aim of this article is to provide readers informally with the basic notions of defeasible and non-monotonic reasoning, logics borrowed from artificial intelligence. It then describes argumentation theory, a paradigm for implementing defeasible reasoning in practice as well as the common multilayer schema upon which argument-based models are usually built. The second aim is to describe the selection of argumentbased applications in the medical and health-care sectors. Finally, the paper will conclude with a summary of the features, which make defeasible reasoning and argumentation theory attractive, that emerge from the applications under review. The target reader is a …