Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Assesing Completeness Of Solvency And Financial Condition Reports Through The Use Of Machine Learning And Text Classification, Ruairí Nugent

Dissertations

Text mining is a method for extracting useful information from unstructured data through the identification and exploration of large amounts of text. It is a valuable support tool for organisations. It enables a greater understanding and identification of relevant business insights from text. Critically it identifies connections between information within texts that would otherwise go unnoticed. Its application is prevalent in areas such as marketing and political science however, until recently it has been largely overlooked within economics. Central banks are beginning to investigate the benefits of machine learning, sentiment analysis and natural language processing in light of the large …

Augmented Reality As A Potential Tool For Filmmaking, Paul Blachfield

Dissertations

Augmented Reality (AR) has been used for a wide variety of industries. The purpose of this study was to determine the suitability of this technology for use in filmmaking. One of the problems on a film set is the time taken to block a scene. Blocking involves the placement of subjects and props within a scene. Different ideas have been used for blocking including previzualisation and Virtual Reality (VR). This study proposesed the use of AR as a tool to solve this problem. Marker-based and Markerless AR were assessed in turn to determine their suitability for addressing the problem. The …

An Analysis Of Software Testing Practices On Migrations From On Premise To Cloud Hosted Environments, Ronan Mullen

Dissertations

This research project examines the differences between software testing practices that are carried out on software that is installed locally (i.e. on premise) versus software that has migrated to a cloud hosted environment. In conjunction with this, focus was placed on determining what methodologies and frameworks are in existence for assisting with software migrations to the cloud. The reason for carrying out this research project was that the transition to cloud computing is becoming more and more mainstream, as a result organisations are required to focus their efforts on how best to move their software to the cloud while ensuring …

An Exploration Of Parliamentary Speeches In The Irish Parliament Using Topic Modeling, Fiona Leheny

Dissertations

The only resource available in the public domain which highlights parliamentary ac tivity is parliamentary questions. Up until the last ten years, manual content analysis was carried out to classify these. More recently, machine learning techniques have been used to automatically classify and analyse these data sets. This study analyses the verbal parliamentary speeches in the Irish Parliament (known as the D´ail) over a ten year period using unsupervised machine learning. It does so by applying a less utilised topic modeling technique, known as Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), to de tect the latent themes in these speeches. A two-layer dynamic …

A Performance Comparison Of Neural Network And Svm Classifiers Using Eeg Spectral Features To Predict Epileptic Seizures, Ian Thomas Tennant Watson

Dissertations

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, and afflicts approximately 70 million people globally. 30-40% of patients have refractory epilepsy, where seizures cannot be controlled by anti-epileptic medication, and surgery is neither appropriate, nor available. The unpredictable nature of epileptic seizures is the primary cause of mortality among patients, and leads to significant psychosocial disability. If seizures could be predicted in advance, automatic seizure warning systems could transform the lives of millions of people. This study presents a performance comparison of artificial neural network and sup port vector machine classifiers, using EEG spectral features to predict the onset …

Visualization Of Co-Authorshipin Dit Arrow, Dan Xu

Dissertations

With the popularization of information technology and the unprecedented development of online reading, the management and service of the library are facing severe challenges; the traditional library operation mode has been challenging to optimize the service. At the same time, there is also a fatal impact on library collection and systematic management, however, with the development of visualization techniques in management and service, the library can alleviate the effect of the current network information basically, which achieves the intellectual development of library field. This study empirically provides the evidence to indicate that the force directed layout has the statistically significant …

An Investigation Into Factors Which Explain The Scores And Voting Patterns Of The Eurovision Song Contest., Oisín Leonard

Dissertations

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual international television song competition. Participating countries send a group or individual artist to perform an original song at the competition. The winner is decided by all participating countries using a voting system that incorporates both a public televote and an expert jury vote. Countries are excluded from voting for their entry and the country with the highest score wins. A high scoring performance and the voting patterns of the ESC can be explained by a complex set of factors. These factors can be divided into three groups; performance factors, competition factors and …

Intergrating The Fruin Los Into The Multi-Objective Ant Colony System, Tirdad Kiafar

Dissertations

Building evacuation simulation provides the planners and designers an opportunity to analyse the designs and plan a precise, scenario specific instruction for disaster times. Nevertheless, when disaster strikes, the unexpected may happen and many egress paths may get blocked or the conditions of evacuees may not let the execution of emergency plans go smoothly. During disaster times, effective route-finding methods can help efficient evacuation process, in which the directors are able to react to the sudden changes in the environment. This research tries to integrate the highly accepted human dynamics methods proposed by Fruin into the Ant-Colony optimisation route-finding method. …

Exploring The Features To Classify The Musical Period Of Western Classical Music, Arturo Martínez Gallardo

Dissertations

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) focuses on extracting meaningful information from music content. MIR is a growing field of research with many applications such as music recommendation systems, fingerprinting, query-by-humming or music genre classification. This study aims to classify the styles of Western classical music, as this has not been explored to a great extent by MIR. In particular, this research will evaluate the impact of different music characteristics on identifying the musical period of Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern. In order to easily extract features related to music theory, symbolic representation or music scores were used, instead of audio format. …

That Seems Made Up: Deep Learning Classifiers For Fiction & Non Fiction Book Reviews, Clement Manger

Dissertations

The thesis aims to take the first step towards automated extraction of the information found in book reviews, by using machine learning tools to assign a label of fiction or non fiction to the text. The thesis makes use of neural networks and performs experiments around architecture, hyper-parameters and text processing from which an optimized model is produced. The thesis enjoys certain successes; it was possible to match the state of the art achieved by (Kim, 2014) and computation was sped up considerably from the default to the optimized model by 13.8 seconds per 50 steps. Further it is confirmed …

Identifying And Scoping Context-Specific Use Cases For Blockchain-Enabled Systems In The Wild., Fiona Delaney

Dissertations

Advances in technology often provide a catalyst for digital innovation. Arising from the global banking crisis at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, decentralised and distributed systems have seen a surge in growth and interest. Blockchain technology, the foundation of the decentralised virtual currency Bitcoin, is one such catalyst. The main component of a blockchain, is its public record of verified, timestamped transactions maintained in an append-only, chain-like, data structure. This record is replicated across n-nodes in a network of co-operating participants. This distribution offers a public proof of transactions verified in the past. Beyond tokens …

Automatic Table Extension With Open Data, Benedikt Kleppmann

Dissertations

With thousands of data sources available on the web as well as within organisations, data scientists increasingly spend more time searching for data than analysing it. To ease the task of find and integrating relevant data for data mining projects, this dissertation presents two new methods for automatic table extension. Automatic table extension systems take over the task of tata discovery and data integration by adding new columns with new information (new attributes) to any table. The data values in the new columns are extracted from a given corpus of tables.

Handwritten Digit Recognition And Classification Using Machine Learning, Ke Zhao

Dissertations

In this paper, multiple learning techniques based on Optical character recognition (OCR) for the handwritten digit recognition are examined, and a new accuracy level for recognition of the MNIST dataset is reported. The proposed framework involves three primary parts, image pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. This study strives to improve the recognition accuracy by more than 99% in handwritten digit recognition. As will be seen, pre-processing and feature extraction play crucial roles in this experiment to reach the highest accuracy.

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Dissertations

This thesis reviews the current state of photometric classification in Astronomy and identifies two main gaps: a dependence on handcrafted rules, and a lack of interpretability in the more successful classifiers. To address this, Deep Learning and Computer Vision were used to create a more interpretable model, using unsupervised training to reduce human bias.

The main contribution is the investigation into the impact of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for the classification task. The feature-extraction is achieved by implementing an unsupervised Deep Belief Network to extract lower-dimensionality features from the multi-wavelength image data captured by the Sloan Digital …

Predicting Intake Of Applications For First Registration In The Property Registration Authority, Orlaith Mernagh

Dissertations

The motivation for this dissertation is rooted in a real business need. The Property Registration Authority is the state organisation tasked with maintaining a register of land ownership on the island of Ireland. The PRA currently faces a series of challenges; a high level of staff retiring and the inherent loss of knowledge associated with this trend, a lack of recruitment in recent years and a large increase in lodgement of applications for first registration as a result of legislation. The organisation therefore requires a reliable system for predicting future intake. Prior to this project, there has also been a …

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 …

Flash Animation Project: Written Report, Peter Dee

Dissertations

A written report about a Flash animation project to include the 3 headings of Animation Techniques, Story Telling and Audio along with a critique and an appendix. The Flash animation project is based upon one of Aesop's fables entitled 'The King's Son & the Painted Lion'.