Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Survey On Outdoor Navigation Applications For People With Visual Impairment, Fatmaelzahraa Eltaher, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Jane Courtney, Susan Mckeever

Datasets

Outdoor navigation is a very challenging activity for People who suffer from Blindness or Visually Impairment (PBVI). Having examined the current literature, we conclude that there are very few publications providing a nuanced understanding of how PBVI undertake a journey in an outdoor environment and what their main challenges and obstacles are. To throw some light on this gap, we conducted a questionnaire in collaboration with the National Council for the Blind Ireland (NCBI) for 49 PBVI. Our questionnaire gathers information about key aspects related to PBVI outdoor navigation such as support tools/devices, hazards, journey preparation, crossing roads, and understanding …

Towards A Framework For Privacy-Preserving Pedestrian Analysis, Anil Kunchala, Mélanie Bouroche, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Conference papers

The design of pedestrian-friendly infrastructures plays a crucial role in creating sustainable transportation in urban environments. Analyzing pedestrian behaviour in response to existing infrastructure is pivotal to planning, maintaining, and creating more pedestrian-friendly facilities. Many approaches have been proposed to extract such behaviour by applying deep learning models to video data. Video data, however, includes an broad spectrum of privacy-sensitive information about individuals, such as their location at a given time or who they are with. Most of the existing models use privacy-invasive methodologies to track, detect, and analyse individual or group pedestrian behaviour patterns. As a step towards privacy-preserving …

Electromechanical Coupling In Collagen Measured Under Increasing Relative Humidity, Arwa Bazaid, Fengyuan Zhang, Qiancheng Zhang, Sabine Neumayer, Denise Denning, Stefan Habelitz, Ana Marina Ferreira, Brian J. Rodriguez

Articles

The functional role of collagen piezoelectricity has been under debate since the discovery of piezoelectricity in bone in 1957. The possibility that piezoelectricity plays a role in bone remodelling has generated interest in the investigation of this effect in relevant physiological conditions; however, there are conflicting reports as to whether collagen is piezoelectric in a humid environment. In macroscale measurements, the piezoelectricity in hydrated tendon has been shown to be insignificant compared to dehydrated tendon, whereas, at the nanoscale, the piezoelectric effect has been observed in both dry and wet bone using piezo response force microscopy (PFM). In this work, …

Label-Free Quantification Of Nanoencapsulated Piperonyl Esters In Cosmetic Hydrogels Using Raman Spectroscopy, Suha Elderderi, Franck Bonnier, Xavier Perse, Hugh Byrne, Florent Yvergnaux, Igor Chourpa, Abdalla A. Elbashir, Emilie Munnier

Articles

Raman spectroscopy is a well-established technique for the molecular characterisation of samples and does not require extensive pre-analytical processing for complex cosmetic products. As an illustration of its potential, this study investigates the quantitative performance of Raman spectroscopy coupled with partial least squares regression (PLSR) for the analysis of Alginate nanoencapsulated Piperonyl Esters (ANC-PE) incorporated into a hydrogel. A total of 96 ANC-PE samples covering a 0.4% w/w–8.3% w/w PE concentration range have been prepared and analysed. Despite the complex formulation of the sample, the spectral features of the PE can be detected and used to quantify the concentrations. Using …

Integrable Systems On Symmetric Spaces From A Quadratic Pencil Of Lax Operators, Rossen Ivanov

Conference papers

The article surveys the recent results on integrable systems arising from quadratic pencil of Lax operator L, with values in a Hermitian symmetric space. The counterpart operator M in the Lax pair defines positive, negative and rational flows. The results are illustrated with examples from the A.III symmetric space. The modeling aspect of the arising higher order nonlinear Schrödinger equations is briefly discussed.

Cavitation Erosion And Corrosion Resistance Of Hydrophobic Sol-Gel Coatings On Aluminium Alloy, Manasa Hegde, Joseph Mohan, Muhammad Qasim Mushtaq Warraich, Yvonne Kavanagh, Brendan Duffy, Edmond F. Tobin

Articles

Cavitation erosion and erosion-corrosion are the popular failure modes of hydronautics components namely propellers, valves, turbines etc which occurs due to mechanical destructions and electrochemical corrosion. Erosion corrosion is caused due to surge in the number of solid particles affecting the surfaces whereas cavitation erosion is caused due to steady collapse of cavities or bubbles. Aluminium alloys are widely used in marine renewable industries owing to its high strength, light weight and good corrosion resistance. Despite that, cavitation and erosion-corrosion are the limiting factors for these alloys. The aim of the present work is to produce a coating system capable …

Design, Synthesis And Biological Evaluation Of A Novel Bioactive Indane Scaffold 2-(Diphenylmethylene)C-2,3-Dihydro-1h-Inden-1-One With Potential Anticancer Activity, Tao Zhang, Vilmar Bandero, Claire Corcoran, Ismael Obaidi, Manuel Ruether, John O'Brien, Lorraine O'Driscoll, Neil Frankish, Helen Sheridan

Articles

Over the past decades, designing of privileged structures has emerged as a useful approach to the discovery and optimisation of novel biologically active molecules, and many have been successfully exploited across and within different target families. Examples include indole, quinolone, isoquinoline, benzofuran and chromone, etc. In the current study, we focus on synthesising a novel hybrid scaffold constituting naturally occurring benzophenone (14) and indanone (22) ring systems, leading to a general structure of 2-(diphenylmethylene)-2,3-dihydro-1H-inden-1-one (23). It was hypothesised this new hybrid system would provide enhanced anti-cancer activity owing to the presence of the common features associated with the tubulin binding …

Microfluidic Flowmeter Based On Liquid Crystal Filled Nested Capillary, Zhe Wang, Zhuochen Wang, Anuradha Rout, Qiang Wu, Yuliya Semenova

Conference Papers

A novel flowmeter composed of a liquid crystal-filled nested capillary is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Whispering gallery modes (WGMs) in the nested capillary are excited by a tapered fiber coupled perpendicularly to the nested capillary. The WGM transmission spectrum of the fiber taper was optimized to achieve the highest possible quality (Q) factor by moving the capillary along the axis of the fiber taper. The air flowing through the capillary cools it down, which leads to a temperature-induced change of the refractive index of the nematic liquid crystal. This change in turn leads to a spectral shift of the WGM …

Characterization Of Food Chain Clostridioides Difficile Isolates In Terms Of Ribotype And Antimicrobial Resistance, Pilar Marcos, Aoife Doyle, Paul Whyte, Thomas R. Rogers, Maire Mcelroy, Seamus Fanning, Jesus Maria Frias, Declan Bolton

Articles

The aim of this study was to characterize C. difficile isolates from the farm, abattoir, and retail outlets in Ireland in terms of ribotype and antibiotic resistance (vancomycin, erythromycin, metronidazole, moxifloxacin, clindamycin, and rifampicin) using PCR and E-test methods, respectively. The most common ribotype in all stages of the food chain (including retail foods) was 078 and a variant (RT078/4). Less commonly reported (014/0, 002/1, 049, and 205) and novel (RT530, 547, and 683) ribotypes were also detected, but at lower frequencies. Approximately 72% (26/36 tested) of the isolates tested were resistant to at least one antibiotic, with the majority …

Evaluation Of The Photon Contributions To The Solar Energy Conversion For Organic Luminescent Down-Shifting Liquid Beam Splitters In Hybrid Photovoltaic-Thermal (Pvt) Applications Using Raytracing Monte Carlo Simulations, Kenneth Coldrick

Articles

A hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) system combines photovoltaic (PV) and photo-thermal (PT) energy collection into a single structure, enhancing the potential to achieve greater solar energy conversion efficiencies. Such enhanced efficiencies can result in greater economic returns and could promote a larger uptake of PVT devices in cold and temperate climate countries. Through the utilization of a Monte Carlo ray-tracing model, this work provides new insights into the optical, electrical, and thermal characteristics of PVT devices. In particular, the work focuses on evaluating the behaviour of novel luminescent imidazole-phenanthroline-based working fluids that were previously experimentally investigated as liquid spectral beam splitters …

Feature Papers In Optical Sensors 2022, Vittorio M. N. Passaro, Yuliya Semenova, Benjamin Miller

Articles

Today, optical sensors are the subject of a very significant number of studies and applications. Many well-established technologies, including free-space optics, integrated photonics, and fiber optics approaches, have been developed in recent decades to fabricate and develop increasingly more efficient optical sensors for applications ranging from industrial control to monitoring the environment, biomedical use, and even as part of the Internet of Things.

Enhancing The Thermo-Optic Tuning Performance Of Whispering Gallery Modes In A Microcapillary Resonator Filled With Nematic Liquid Crystals, Zhe Wang, Arun Kumar Mallik, Fangfang Wei, Zhuochen Wang, Anuradha Rout, Qiang Wu, Yuliya Semenova

Articles

We investigated both theoretically and experimentally, the thermo-optic tuning of whispering-gallery modes (WGMs) in a microcapillary resonator filled with nematic liquid-crystal (LC). The tuning of WGMs was realized due to the photo-thermal effect of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) on the surface of a fiber half-taper connected to a pump laser source, resulting in temperature-induced refractive index (RI) changes of the LC material. Based on perturbation theory, we analyzed the influence the RI and the wall thickness on the sensitivity of the proposed tuning scheme. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrated that increasing the thickness of the MNPs coating on the fiber taper surface …

The Pierce Decomposition And Pierce Embedding Of Endomorphism Rings Of Abelian P-Groups, Brendan Goldsmith, Luigi Salce

Articles

We prove that more classes of groups than those described by Pierce have the property that the map Ψ is surjective, and we furnish examples of groups which do not have this property. Several results connecting the Pierce decomposition and the Pierce embedding of End(G) are obtained that allow one to derive general conditions on a group G which ensure that the Pierce embedding of End(G) is not surjective.

Survey Data: Optimising Retrofitted Insulation For Irish Residential Building Walls, Rakshit D. Muddu, Aimee Byrne, Anthony Robinson Dr.

Datasets

A survey was conducted to determine the preferred set point temperature and heating pattern among Irish households. The survey was sent to 237 people living across Ireland, out of which 32 respondents skipped the survey and 9 surveys were found to be incomplete. Amongst the counties in Ireland 71.1% respondents were from Dublin, 6.34% from Kildare, 5% from Meath, 5% from Wicklow and in all the remaining counties response rate was below 2%. Part 1: This section of the survey recorded information regarding characteristics of the building such as house type, wall type, insulation type, period the house was built. …

Identifying Gendered Language, Shweta Soundararajan, Sarah Jane Delany

Academic Posters Collection

Gendered language refers to the use of words that indicate the gender of an individual. It can be explicit, where the gender is directly implied by the specific words used (e.g., mother, she, man), or it can be implicit, where societal roles and behaviors convey a person's gender. For example, expectations that women display communal traits (e.g., affectionate, caring, gentle) and men display agentic traits (e.g., assertive, competitive, decisive). The presence of gendered language in natural language processing (NLP) systems can reinforce gender stereotypes and bias. Our work introduces an approach to creating gendered language datasets using ChatGPT. These datasets …

Improve Engagement With Full Labs And Motivated Students: Interactive Labs Via Low Stakes Assessment, Susan Mckeever, Patricia O'Byrne, Amanda O'Farrell

Academic Posters Collection

Poor engagement and attendance is an endemic problem at third level, particularly post covid. Our approach shows how the use of regular in-lab assessment and challenges can dramatically increase student participation and learning. Using three case studies, we demonstrate how we have successfully used this low-stakes assessment approach to improve student outcomes, across a range of modules.

Detecting Patches On Road Pavement Images Acquired With 3d Laser Sensors Using Object Detection And Deep Learning, Ibrahim Hassan Syed, Dympna O'Sullivan, Susan Mckeever, David Power, Ray Mcgowan, Kieran Feighan

Academic Posters Collection

Regular pavement inspections are key to good road maintenance and road defect corrections. Advanced pavement inspection systems such as LCMS (Laser Crack Measurement System) can automatically detect the presence of different defects using 3D lasers. However, such systems still require manual involvement to complete the detection of pavement defects. This work proposes an automatic patch detection system using an object detection technique. Results show that the object detection model can successfully detect patches inside LCMS images and suggest that the proposed approach could be integrated into the existing pavement inspection systems.

Towards Accommodating Gerunds Within The Sign Language Lexicon, Zaid Mohammed, Irene Murtagh

Academic Posters Collection

This work is part of ongoing research work that focuses on the linguistic analysis and computational description of five different Sign Languages (SLs) namely Irish Sign Language (ISL), Flemish Sign Language (VGT), Dutch Sign Language (NGT), Spanish Sign Language (LSE), and British Sign Language (BSL) as part of the SignON project. This work will be leveraged to inform the development of SL lexicon entries for a Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) system. In particular, this research focuses on ISL. We investigate the existence of constructions similar to or equivalent in functionality to gerunds in spoken language, in particular, English. The …

The European Commission And Ai: Guidelines, Acts And Plans Impacting The Teaching Of Ai And Teaching With Ai, Keith Quille, Brett A. Becker, Lidia Vidal-Meliá

Academic Posters Collection

Recent developments, guidelines, and acts by the European Commission have started to frame policy for AI and related areas such as ML and data, not only for the broader community, but in the context of education specifically. This poster presents a succinct overview of these developments. Specifically, we look to bring together all publications that might impact the teaching of AI (for example, teacher expectations in the coming years around AI competencies) and publications that affect the use of AI in the classroom. We mean using tools and systems that incorporate both ‘Good Old Fashioned’ AI and those that can …

The Proof Is In The Pudding – Using Perceived Stress To Measure Short-Term Impact In Initiatives To Enhance Gender Balance In Computing Education, Alina Berry, Sarah Jane Delany

Academic Posters Collection

The problem of gender imbalance in computing higher education has forced academics and professionals to implement a wide range of initiatives. Many initiatives use recruitment or retention numbers as their most obvious evidence of impact. This type of evidence of impact is, however, more resource heavy to obtain, as well as often requires a longitudinal approach. There are many shorter term initiatives that use other ways to measure their success.

First, this poster presents with a review of existing evaluation measures in interventions to recruit and retain women in computing education across the board. Three main groups of evaluation come …

Modification Of Hyaluronic Acid To Enable Click Chemistry Photo-Crosslinking Of Hydrogels With Tailorable Degradation Profiles, Ciara Buckley

Articles

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a naturally occurring mucopolysaccharide that, due to its inherent bioactivity and extracellular matrix-like structure, has the potential to be utilised extensively in tissue engineering. However, this glycosaminoglycan lacks the properties required for cellular adhesion and photo-crosslinking by UV light, which significantly hinders this polymers applicability. This research presents a method for modifying hyaluronic acid via thiolation and methacrylation to generate a novel photo-crosslinkable polymer with improved physicochemical properties, biocompatibility and the potential to customize biodegradability according to the ratio of monomers used. A decrease in stiffness proportional to increasing thiol concentration was observed when testing the …

Ideating Explainable Ai, Helen Sheridan, Emma Murphy, Dympna O'Sullivan

Academic Posters Collection

Exploring user's mental models of an AI-driven recruitment system using design-thinking methods as an approach to ideating XAI.

Co-Design Of An Interactive Wellness Park: Exploring Design Requirements For A Multimodal Outdoor Physical Web Installation With Older Adults, Fatima Badmos

Academic Posters Collection

The global demographic landscape is experiencing a notable shift, characterised by a growing proportion of adults over 60. According to projections, the proportion of individuals aged 60 and above is expected to reach one-sixth of the global population by 2030. Furthermore, by 2050, this demographic is projected to exceed a staggering two billion people. Amidst this shift, there is an urgent need to develop interactive and innovative solutions to address older adults' unique challenges, particularly in outdoor physical activity.

A co-design methodology involving older adults’ participation from the idea generation to the application development process will be adopted to address …

Computer Science Outreach To Inform Secondary School Students’ Perceptions Of Computer Science: Preliminary Findings, Karen Nolan, Roisin Faherty, Keith Quille, Keith Nolan, Amanda O'Farrell, Brett A. Becker

Academic Posters Collection

This poster describes a longitudinal K-12 outreach programme to promote Computer Science in Ireland, which ran over a three-year period from 2017- 2020. A pilot phase was conducted in the first year from 2017-2018 with 2900 students participating. The implementation phase began in 2018, when 7320 students participated across the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 academic years. The programme consisted of a free onsite school delivery of a two-hour camp that introduced students to a range of Computing topics: addressing computing perceptions, introduction to coding, and exploration of computational thinking. Schools self-selected, and the programme reached a large number of schools with …

The Clinical Transferability Of Raman Micro-Spectroscopic Systems For Cervical Cytopathology, Rubina Shaikh Dr, Sarah Loughlin, Alison Malkin, John J. O'Leary, Cara M. Martin, Fiona Lyng

Conference papers

The clinical potential for Raman microscopic systems is well established for early diagnosis via cytology. Although Raman systems offer a complementary diagnostic tool providing molecular information, it is not yet utilised substantially in clinics. A few challenges for the clinical implementation of Raman spectroscopy are system and user variability. In this study, we asked how much variability occurs due to different Raman systems or users. To address these questions, we measured the same set of cells using two different Raman microscopes and by two different users. And classification models were generated using multivariate partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and …

The Use Of Transport Time Scales As Indicators Of Pollution Persistence In A Macro-Tidal Setting, Guanghai Gao, John J. O'Sullivan, Aisling Corkery, Zeinab Bedri, Gregory M.P. O'Hare, Wim G. Meijer

Articles

An understanding of water exchange processes is essential for assessing water quality management issues in coastal bays. This paper evaluates the impact of water exchange processes on pollution persistence in a macro-tidal semi-closed coastal bay through two transport time scales (TTS), namely residence time and exposure time. The numerical model was calibrated against field-measured data for various tidal conditions. Simulated current speeds and directions were shown to agree well with the field data. By considering different release scenarios of a conservative tracer by the refinement of an integrated hydrodynamic and solute transport model (the EFDC), the two TTS were used …

Design Of A D-Shaped Photonic Crystal Fiber-Based Plasmonic Sensor For Refractive Index Detection, Rayhan Habib Jibon, Zhe Wang, Anuradha Rout, Zhuochen Wang, Yuliya Semenova

Conference Papers

A novel design for a D-shaped photonic crystal fiber-based plasmonic sensor is proposed and its sensitivity and measurement resolution have been theoretically investigated for analytes with a wide range of refractive indices.

Use Of Inner/Outer Sphere Terminology In Electrochemistry—A Hexacyanoferrate Ii/Iii Case Study, John Cassidy, Rafaela Cristina De Carvalho, Tony Betts

Articles

Salts of hexacyanoferrate II/III anions have been widely used as redox couple probe molecules to determine the characteristics of electrode surfaces. Examples include the assessment of electrocatalysts for energy applications and electrocatalysts for the detection of biological or chemical species, as well as the determination of electrochemically active surface areas. An examination of the electrochemical literature, based largely on cyclic voltammetric investigations, reveals a wide range of peak separation and/or heterogeneous electron transfer rate constants, classified sometimes as inner or outer sphere electron transfer processes. Originally developed for the mechanistic interpretation of inorganic transition metal compounds in solution, this terminology …

The Development Of Optomechanical Sensors—Integrating Diffractive Optical Structures For Enhanced Sensitivity, Faolan Radford Mcgovern, Aleksandra Hernik, Catherine M. Grogan, George Amarandei, Izabela Naydenova

Conference Papers

The term optomechanical sensors describes devices based on coupling the optical and mechanical sensing principles. The presence of a target analyte leads to a mechanical change, which, in turn, determines an alteration in the light propagation. Having higher sensitivity in comparison with the individual technologies upon which they are based, the optomechanical devices are used in biosensing, humidity, temperature, and gases detection. This perspective focuses on a particular class, namely on devices based on diffractive optical structures (DOS). Many configurations have been developed, including cantilever- and MEMS-type devices, fiber Bragg grating sensors, and cavity optomechanical sensing devices. These state-of-the-art sensors …

Framework For Trustworthy Ai In The Health Sector, Mykhailo Danilevskyi

Academic Posters Collection

The European Commission defines that Trustworthy AI should be lawful, ethical and robust. The ethical component and its technical methods are the main focus of the research. According to this, the initial research goal is to create a methodology for evaluating datasets for ML modeling using ethical principles in the healthcare domain. Ethical risk assessment will help to ensure compliance with principles such as privacy, fairness, safety and transparency which are especially important for the Health Care sector. At the same time, risks must be evaluated with respect to AI model performance and possible scenarios of risk mitigation. Ethical risk …