Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Framework Of Web-Based Dark Patterns That Can Be Detected Manually Or Automatically, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Andrea Curley, Dympna O'Sullivan, Damian Gordon, Brendan Tierney

Articles

This research explores the design and development of a framework for the detection of Dark Patterns, which are a series of user interface tricks that manipulate users into actions that they do not intend to do, for example, share more data than they want to, or spend more money than they plan to. The interface does this using either deception or other psychological nudges. User Interface experts have categorized a number of these tricks that are commonly used and have called them Dark Patterns. They are typically varied in their form and what they do, and the goal of this …

A Nanoscale Shape-Discovery Framework Supporting Systematic Investigations Of Shape-Dependent Biological Effects And Immunomodulation, Wei Zhang, Hender Lopez, Luca Boselli, Paolo Bigini, André Perez-Potti, Zengchun Xie, Valentina Castagnola, Qi Cai, Camila P. Silveira, Joao M. De Araujo, Laura Talamini, Nicolò Panini, Giuseppe Ristagno, Martina B. Violatto, Stéphanie Devineau, Marco P. Monopoli, Mario Salmona, Valeria A. Giannone, Sandra Lara, Kenneth A. Dawson, Yan Yan

Articles

Since it is now possible to make, in a controlled fashion, an almost unlimited variety of nanostructure shapes, it is of increasing interest to understand the forms of biological control that nanoscale shape allows. However, a priori rational investigation of such a vast universe of shapes appears to present intractable fundamental and practical challenges. This has limited the useful systematic investigation of their biological interactions and the development of innovative nanoscale shape-dependent therapies. Here, we introduce a concept of biologically relevant inductive nanoscale shape discovery and evaluation that is ideally suited to, and will ultimately become, a vehicle for machine …

The Circle Of Life: The Mathematics Of Predator-Prey Dynamics, John Butler, Rebecca Brady

Articles

Some animals hunt other animals to feed themselves; these animals are called predators. Animals who are hunted and eaten are known as prey. What do you think would happen if a predator were introduced to an ecosystem where the prey previously lived without fear of being hunted? Would the new predator eat all the prey animals until they go extinct? Actually, the relationship between predator and prey is far more interesting than this. In this article, we show what the predator-prey relationship looks like over time and explain how scientists can make predictions about future population levels, all using basic …

Application Of Competitive Intelligence For Insular Territories: Automatic Analysis Of Scientific And Technology Trends To Fight The Negative Effects Of Climate Change, Henri Dou, Pierre Fournie

International Journal of Islands Research

Islands are fragile territories because of their geographical position. As a result, climate impacts can have serious consequences, of which some are irreversible. Therefore, it is necessary to allow insular territories to benefit from the latest scientific and technological advances in combating climate effects. The current article shows how to deal with automatic analysis of scientific information on the one hand, but also its applications via patents. We will analyse the latest scientific results as well as their possible applications using patent analysis. We will also focus on experts, laboratories, and leading companies, that are active on the field. The …

Climate Change-Induced Effects On Beach Degradation And Tourist Behaviour: A Review Of Previous Studies With Potential In An Island Tourism Context, Yen E. Lam González, Carmen Garcia, Matias M. González Hernández, Carmelo J. Leon

International Journal of Islands Research

This article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of papers addressing the topic of climate change impacts on beach loss and degradation, and its relation to tourist behaviour (destination choice, willingness to re-visit, expenditure and willingness to pay). The main aim is to identify values that can be used in future research works in the context of island tourism. We found that the strong specialisation and fragmentation of data and methods limit the transferability potential of previous research analysing climate-induced effects on beaches and tourist behaviour. Researchers from different fields bring their own conceptual models which often address similar problems but use …

Explaining Deep Learning Models For Tabular Data Using Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation, Ihsan Ullah, Andre Rios, Vaibhov Gala, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Trust and credibility in machine learning models are bolstered by the ability of a model to explain its decisions. While explainability of deep learning models is a well-known challenge, a further challenge is clarity of the explanation itself for relevant stakeholders of the model. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), an established explainability technique developed for deep models in computer vision, provides intuitive human-readable heat maps of input images. We present the novel application of LRP with tabular datasets containing mixed data (categorical and numerical) using a deep neural network (1D-CNN), for Credit Card Fraud detection and Telecom Customer Churn prediction use …

“Transitioning Organisations From A Data Quagmire To Knowledge Nirvana Through The Digital Thread”, David Twohig, Barry Heavey

Level 3

Historically, organisations have managed product data in a combination of Microsoft Office, Sharepoint and Document Management Systems. In this paper, we explore how different technologies can be leveraged to create digital product profiles, and in doing so structure data to enable effective knowledge management.

Newgrange Skyscape In Stellarium, Frank Prendergast

Articles

Newgrange Skyscape in Stellarium is a new customised landscape planetarium model giving the user the unique ability to interrogate the dynamic sky above the Boyne Valley on any date of interest during the hours of daylight or darkness. Archaeological, astronomical and topographical points of interest are labelled in the model and visible even during the hours of darkness. These are summarily described in a short gazetteer appended at the end of the instruction document to encourage further exploration of the wonderful heritage found in the Boyne Valley and beyond.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=aGPsVGBXkY4

Watch on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/493351576

Extending R2rml-F To Support Dynamic Datatype And Language Tags, Aparna Nayak, Bojan Bozic, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Linked data is often generated from raw data with the help of mapping languages. Complex data transformation is one of the essential parts while uplifting data which either can be implemented as custom solutions or separated from the mapping process. In this paper, we propose an approach of separating complex data transformations from the mapping process that can still be reusable across the systems. In the proposed method, complex data transformations include the entailment of (i) language tag and (ii) datatype present at the data source. The proposed method also includes inferring missing datatype information. We extended R2RML-F to handle …

Notions Of Explainability And Evaluation Approaches For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models that lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested, coupled with several studies attempting to define the concept of explainability and its evaluation. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering all the scientific studies via a hierarchical system that classifies theories and notions related to the concept of explainability …

A Novel Parabolic Model Of Instructional Efficiency Grounded On Ideal Mental Workload And Performance, Luca Longo, Murali Rajendran

Articles

Instructional efficiency within education is a measurable concept and models have been proposed to assess it. The main assumption behind these models is that efficiency is the capacity to achieve established goals at the minimal expense of resources. This article challenges this assumption by contributing to the body of Knowledge with a novel model that is grounded on ideal mental workload and performance, namely the parabolic model of instructional efficiency. A comparative empirical investigation has been constructed to demonstrate the potential of this model for instructional design evaluation. Evidence demonstrated that this model achieved a good concurrent validity with the …

Provenance: An Intermediary-Free Solution For Digital Content Verification, Bilal Yousuf, M. Atif Qureshi, Brendan Spillane, Gary Munnelly, Oisin Carroll, Matthew Runswick, Kirsty Park, Eileen Culloty, Owen Conlan, Jane Suiter

Articles

The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and …

Towards A Framework For Comparing Functionalities Of Multimorbidity Clinical Decision Support: A Literature-Based Feature Set And Benchmark Cases., Dympna O'Sullivan, William Van Woensel, Szymon Wilk, Samson Tu, Wojtek Michalowski, Samina Abidi, Marc Carrier, Ruth Edry, Irit Hochberg, Stephen Kingwell, Alexandra Kogan, Martin Michalowski, Hugh O'Sullivan, Mor Peleg

Articles

Multimorbidity, the coexistence of two or more health conditions, has become more prevalent as mortality rates in many countries have declined and their populations have aged. Multimorbidity presents significant difficulties for Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), particularly in cases where recommendations from relevant clinical guidelines offer conflicting advice. A number of research groups are developing computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) modeling formalisms that integrate recommendations from multiple Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) for knowledge-based multimorbidity decision support. In this paper we describe work towards the development of a framework for comparing the different approaches to multimorbidity CIG-based clinical decision support (MGCDS). We present …

A Quantitative Evaluation Of Global, Rule-Based Explanations Of Post-Hoc, Model Agnostic Methods, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Understanding the inferences of data-driven, machine-learned models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships consist and can be represented as a set of inference rules. However, the models usually do not explicit these rules to their end-users who, subsequently, perceive them as black-boxes and might not trust their predictions. Therefore, scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models to explain their logic. However, limited work exists on the evaluation and comparison of these methods. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the …

Check Your Tech - The Ethics Of Deepfakes In A Political Context, Dympna O'Sullivan, Damian Gordon, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Michael Collins

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Check Your Tech - The Ethics Of Gamification In Education, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Anna Becevel

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Synergistic Anticancer Response Of Curcumin And Piperine Loaded Lignin-G-P (Nipam-Co-Dmaema) Gold Nanogels Against Glioblastoma Multiforme, Xinyi Zhao, Bilal Javad, Daxing Cui, James Curtin, Furong Tian

Articles

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive and commonly diag- 11 nosed brain cancer and presents a strong resistance to routine chemotherapeutic drugs. 12 The present study involves the synthesis of Lignin-g- p (NIPAM-co-DMAEMA) gold 13 nanogel, loaded with curcumin and piperine to treat GBM. The application has three 14 functions: (1) overcome the limitations of biodistribution, (2) enhance the toxicity of an- 15 ticancer drugs against GBM, (3) identify the uptake pathway. Atom transfer radical 16 polymerization was used to synthesize the Lignin-g-PNIPAM network, crosslinked with 17 the gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to self-assemble into nanogels. The size distribution and …

The Future Of Medicine Is Digital: Developing Educational Materials To Explore The Ethics Of Digital Pills., Dympna O'Sullivan, J. Paul Gibson, Yael Jacob, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon

Conference papers

Digital Pills are a drug-device technology that permit to combine traditional medications with a monitoring system that automatically records data about medication adherence and patients’ physiological data. They are a promising innovation in digital medicine, however their use has raised a number of ethical concerns. In this paper, we outline some of the main Digital Pills technologies and explore key ethical challenges surrounding their use. In this paper, we introduce educational materials we have developed that provide an insight into the technologies and ethical aspects that underpin Digital Pills.

Feature Engineering Vs Feature Selection Vs Hyperparameter Optimization In The Spotify Song Popularity Dataset, Alan Cueva Mora, Brendan Tierney

Conference Papers

Research in Featuring Engineering has been part of the data pre-processing phase of machine learning projects for many years. It can be challenging for new people working with machine learning to understand its importance along with various approaches to find an optimized model. This work uses the Spotify Song Popularity dataset to compare and evaluate Feature Engineering, Feature Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization. The result of this work will demonstrate Feature Engineering has a greater effect on model efficiency when compared to the alternative approaches.

Cleanpage: Fast And Clean Document And Whiteboard Capture, Jane Courtney

Articles

The move from paper to online is not only necessary for remote working, it is also significantly more sustainable. This trend has seen a rising need for the high-quality digitization of content from pages and whiteboards to sharable online material. However, capturing this information is not always easy nor are the results always satisfactory. Available scanning apps vary in their usability and do not always produce clean results, retaining surface imperfections from the page or whiteboard in their output images. CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based document and whiteboard scanning system, is presented. CleanPage requires one button-tap to capture, identify, crop, and …

(Linked) Data Quality Assessment: An Ontological Approach, Aparna Nayak, Bojan Bozic, Luca Longo

Conference papers

The effective functioning of data-intensive applications usually requires that the dataset should be of high quality. The quality depends on the task they will be used for. However, it is possible to identify task-independent data quality dimensions which are solely related to data themselves and can be extracted with the help of rule mining/pattern mining. In order to assess and improve data quality, we propose an ontological approach to report data quality violated triples. Our goal is to provide data stakeholders with a set of methods and techniques to guide them in assessing and improving data quality

Wildflower Pollen Quality In Roadside Habitats, With Particular Emphasis On Hedera Helix, Aoife Mcmullin, Paul Hamilton

SURE Journal: Science Undergraduate Research Experience Journal

The quality of air is of more significance today than ever before. Human population growth and pollutants emitted through fossil fuel consumption put pressures on air quality. It is widely acknowledged that atmospheric pollutants negatively impact human health; the same is also true for the health of wildlife and plants exposed to these pollutants (Brunekreef & Holgate, 2002; EEA, 2019; Schiavoni, et al., 2017). Pollen and seed formation of flowering plants have been affected when grown in areas of poor air quality (Azzazy, 2016; Sénéchal, et al., 2015). The purpose of this research was to assess pollen of …

Sure_J Editorial 3

SURE Journal: Science Undergraduate Research Experience Journal

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Human Or Robot?: Investigating Voice, Appearance And Gesture Motion Realism Of Conversational Social Agents, Ylva Ferstl, Sean Thomas, Cédric Guiard, Cathy Ennis, Rachel Mcdonnell

Conference papers

Research on creation of virtual humans enables increasing automatization of their behavior, including synthesis of verbal and nonverbal behavior. As the achievable realism of different aspects of agent design evolves asynchronously, it is important to understand if and how divergence in realism between behavioral channels can elicit negative user responses. Specifically, in this work, we investigate the question of whether autonomous virtual agents relying on synthetic text-to-speech voices should portray a corresponding level of realism in the non-verbal channels of motion and visual appearance, or if, alternatively, the best available realism of each channel should be used. In two perceptual …

The Development Of Teaching Case Studies To Explore Ethical Issues Associated With Computer Programming, Michael Collins, Damian Gordon, Dympna O'Sullivan

Conference papers

In the past decade software products have become pervasive in many aspects of people’s lives around the world. Unfortunately, the quality of the experience an individual has interacting with that software is dependent on the quality of the software itself, and it is becoming more and more evident that many large software products contain a range of issues and errors, and these issues are not known to the developers of these systems, and they are unaware of the deleterious impacts of those issues on the individuals who use these systems. The authors of this paper are developing a new digital …

Analysis Of The Vertical Movement Of Active Gnss Stations As A Result Of Semidiurnal Tides, Rose Pearson, Eugen Niculae

Conference papers

Ireland is subject to the constant effects and influence of semidiurnal tides. Western coastal regions are exposed to tidal ranges up to and exceeding five metres, consequentially introducing varied water volumes with temporal intervals. In addition, the Earth is elastic in composition, resulting in morphing and warping at the hands of celestial and oceanic forces.

This study looked at Online Precise Point Positioning (PPP) service to accurately monitor the vertical movement of coastal lands. In addition, GNSS Static Post-processing was conducted to discern which method of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) processing is best for detecting VLM (vertical land …

Exploring The Personality Of Virtual Tutors In Conversational Foreign Language Practice, Johanna Dobbriner, Cathy Ennis, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Fluid interaction between virtual agents and humans requires the understanding of many issues of conversational pragmatics. One such issue is the interaction between communication strategy and personality. As a step towards developing models of personality driven pragmatics policies, in this paper, we present our initial experiment to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities. Each user saw a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that a more extroverted outgoing positive personality would be a more successful tutor, were only partially confirmed. While this personality did induce longer conversations in …

Sediqa: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment In A Reading Aid For The Visually Impaired, Jane Courtney

Articles

For visually impaired people (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in optical character recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue—the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function—no small task …

Profiling Mathematical Procedural And Problem-Solving Skills Of Undergraduate Students Following A New Mathematics Curriculum, Fiona Faulkner, Mark Prendergast, Cormac Breen, Michael Carr

Articles

In 2010 a mathematics curriculum was introduced in Irish second level schools entitled ‘Project Maths’ (PM). It aimed to refocus second level mathematics teaching and learning away from an over emphasis on procedural mathematics towards problem solving and real understanding [Department of Education and Skills (DES). (2010). Report of the Project Maths implementation support group. https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Policy-Reports/Report-of-the-Project-Maths-Implementation-Group.pdf]. This paper aims to examine the performance of 1st year undergraduate students’ procedural and problem solving skills after the introduction of PM. A diagnostic test was developed to determine students’ skills in each area and findings demonstrated that students perform statistically significantly …

Immobilized-Enzyme Reactors Integrated Into Analytical Platforms: Recent Advances And Challenges, Bert Wouters Dr, Sinead Currivan, Noor Abdulhussain, T. Hankemeier, Peter J. Schoenmakers

Articles

Immobilized-enzyme reactors (IMERs) are flow-through devices containing enzymes that are physically confined or localized with retention of their catalytic activities. IMERs can be used repeatedly and continuously and have been applied for (bio)polymer degradation, proteomics, biomarker discovery, inhibitor screening, and detection. Online integration of IMERs with analytical instrumentation, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems, reduces the time needed for multi-step workflows, reduces the need for sample handling, and enables automation. However, online integration can also be challenging, as reaching its full potential requires complex instrumental setups and experienced users. This review aims to provide an assessment of recent advances …