Computer Sciences Commons^™

Investigating The Impact Of Outreach Programmes On Second Level Students In Formal And Informal Computer Science Education In Ireland, Karen Nolan

Doctoral

Computer Science (CS) education at second-level in Ireland has undergone significant development, including the introduction of the Leaving Certificate Computer Science (LCCS). However, the existing literature examined demonstrated that access to and participation in CS education is uneven, resulting in many students having limited exposure CS at second-level before making educational choices. At the same time, students who elect to study LCCS require appropriate support as they engage with programming and other aspects of a relatively new formal curriculum. This thesis investigates the function of school-based CS outreach in helping students at these various phases of their second-level CS education …

Bayesian Network: An Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Xai) Approach To Human Performance Modelling For Control Room Operations, Houda Briwa

Theses

Alarm systems in process industry control rooms routinely exceed the performance targets set by standards such as EEMUA 191, placing operators under conditions where reliable performance is most difficult to achieve. Predicting how operators respond under such conditions is central to risk management, yet current Human Reliability Assessment (HRA) methods depend on expert judgement that is rarely tested against operational evidence, assume independence among factors known to interact, and do not explicitly represent the cognitive processes through which performance emerges. In Resilience Engineering terms, these methods encode Work-as-Imagined with limited means to assess how far expectations hold when work is …

An Odd Protocol For An Agent-Based Model Of Hepatitis C Virus Transmission In A Homogeneous Syringe-Sharing Network, Seun Ale, Que Thi Nguyet Nguyen Dr., John D. Kelleher Prof., Elizabeth Hunter Dr.

Reports

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model assumes homogeneous mixing among syringe-sharing agents, without any form of heterogeneity in the agents interactions or syringe-sharing attitude. All syringe-sharing PWID are treated as identical in terms of their interaction frequency and syringe-sharing probability. Interactions are generated dynamically using proximity-based sampling at each timestep (one day), allowing agents to form syringe-sharing interactions based on spatial closeness. The number of daily interaction events is fixed at the population level, and each syringe-sharing agent has the same probability …

An Odd Protocol For An Agent-Based Model Of Hepatitis C Virus Transmission With Inter- And Intra-Group Structural And Behavioural Heterogeneous Syringe-Sharing Networks (5), Seun Ale, Que Nguyen Dr., John D. Kelleher Prof., Elizabeth Hunter Dr.

Reports

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model incorporates structural heterogeneity through a three-group interaction framework and behavioural heterogeneity through group-specific syringe-sharing rates with additional intra-group variability. The syringe-sharing population in the model is divided into core, inner, and outer circle groups representing individuals with high, moderate, and low levels of syringe-sharing interaction intensity, respectively. In addition to differences in the number of daily interaction opportunities across groups, agents in each group are assigned syringe-sharing probabilities that vary at the individual level around their …

An Odd Protocol For An Agent-Based Model Of Hepatitis C Virus Transmission In A Two-Group Structural Heterogeneous Syringe-Sharing Network (M2), Seun Ale, Que Nguyen Dr., John D. Kelleher Prof., Elizabeth Hunter Dr.

Reports

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model extended a baseline homogeneous model by incorporating structural heterogeneity via a two-group interaction framework. The syringe-sharing population in the model is divided into inner and outer circle groups representing individuals with differing levels of syringe-sharing interaction intensity. While all agents share the same syringe-sharing probability and epidemiological processes remain identical across agents, the number of daily interaction opportunities differs between the two groups. Interactions in the model are generated dynamically using proximity-based sampling at each timestep …

An Odd Protocol For An Agent-Based Model Of Hepatitis C Virus Transmission In A Three-Group Structural Heterogeneous Syringe-Sharing Network (M3), Seun Ale, Que Nguyen Dr., John D. Kelleher Prof., Elizabeth Hunter Dr.

Reports

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model incorporates structural heterogeneity through a three-group interaction framework. The syringe-sharing population in the model is divided into core, inner, and outer circle groups representing individuals with high, moderate, and low levels of syringe-sharing interaction intensity, respectively. While the syringe-sharing rate and all epidemiological processes remain identical across agents, the number of daily interaction opportunities differs by agent grouping, capturing variation in structural position within the syringe-sharing network. Interactions are generated dynamically using proximity-based sampling at each …

An Odd Protocol For An Agent-Based Model Of Hepatitis C Virus Transmission With Inter-Group Structural And Behavioural Heterogeneous Syringe-Sharing Networks (M4), Seun Ale, Que Nguyen Dr., John D. Kelleher Prof., Elizabeth Hunter Dr.

Reports

The model described in this ODD is an agent-based model of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID). The model incorporates structural heterogeneity through a three-group interaction framework and behavioural heterogeneity through group-specific syringe-sharing rates. The syringe-sharing population in the model is divided into core, inner, and outer circle groups representing individuals with high, moderate, and low levels of syringe-sharing interaction intensity, respectively. In addition to differences in the number of daily interaction opportunities across groups, agents in each group are assigned distinct syringe-sharing probabilities, reflecting variation in risk-taking behaviour across structural groups within the syringe-sharing …

Vision-Language System Using Open-Source Llms For Consent And Instruction Gestures In Medical Interpreter Robots, Tung Ngo, Emma Murphy, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Effective communication is vital in healthcare, especially across language barriers, where non-verbal cues and gestures are critical. This paper presents a privacy-preserving vision-language framework for medical interpreter robots that detects specific speech acts (consent and instruction) and generates corresponding robotic gestures. Built on locally deployed open-source models, the system utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) with few-shot prompting for intent detection. We also introduce a novel dataset of clinical conversations annotated for speech acts and paired with gesture clips. Our identification module achieved 0.90 accuracy, 0.93 weighted precision, and a 0.91 weighted F1-Score. Our approach significantly improves computational efficiency and, …

A Unified Framework For Evaluating Training Efficiency In Deep (Bayesian) Neural Networks: Metrics, Overtraining, Stopping Criteria, And Grokking Computer Science, Eduardo Cueto Mendoza

Doctoral

Measuring training efficiency for artificial neural networks is an open research problem, current literature reports several attempts to define measures or create reporting frameworks. Current methods lack generality as they require measurements of the hardware or software thus, comparing efficiency between different systems can be difficult. Similarly, current metrics or frameworks generally do not propose the use of the metrics to directly improve training efficiency. This thesis presents three main contributions: (1) a novel framework that quantifies the training efficiency of a neural architecture on a learning task as the average ratio of model accuracy to total energy consumption during …

Gerunds In Irish Sign Language: An Exploratory Analysis, Zaid Mohammed

Doctoral

In sign languages (SLs), e.g., American Sign Language (ASL), gerunds help express the meaning of ongoing actions and activities conveyed by verbs (Klima & Bellugi, 1979, p. 295). In spoken languages, a gerund is a form of the verb that functions as a noun and expresses the state of being or an ongoing action (Maekelberghe, 2020). Gerunds are complex constructions as they have nominal-verbal nature (Travis, 2005, p. 321) and morphological similarity with present participle or progressive aspect (Siegel, 1998). This research is motivated by the challenging nature of distinguishing gerund constructions at the morphological level, and research in sign …

Image Captioning Through The Lens Of The Gricean Maxims: Generating Meaningful And Relevant Image Descriptions, Annika Lindh

Doctoral

Image captioning models enable us to automatically generate natural language image descriptions for previously unseen images. It combines the two fields of computer vision and natural language generation, allowing models to interpret the con tent of an image and communicate that knowledge through natural language text.

Research into image captioning has the potential benefit of reducing the gap in digital information availability between fully sighted individuals and those who are visually impaired. However, automatically generated captions often fail to provide the required level of detail and specificity to achieve this goal. Furthermore, current standard evaluation methods are insufficient at measuring …

The Complexity Of Long-Distance Dependencies And Their Impact On Language Models, Abhijit Shrikant Mahalunkar

Doctoral

Sequential data modeling is an important challenge in various fields and in particular in natural language processing. Building effective sequential models faces a notable challenge in the form of Long-Distance Dependencies (LDDs) within the sequence data. Hence, successfully overcoming this challenge is imperative for developing robust and accurate sequential models across various domains and applications. To tackle this challenge, the first step is to conduct a detailed analysis of the complexity of LDDs observed in various sequence datasets. This thesis offers a thorough exploration and documentation of this analysis. An important finding from this thesis is the consistent patterns of …

Application Of Hyflex In The Application Security Module, Vanessa Ayala-Rivera

Case studies: Digital Education

No abstract provided.

An Evening With Mobile Hyflex, Peter Alexander

Case studies: Digital Education

Network Security is a 10-credit module taught on the part-time Bachelor of Science in Computing in Digital Forensics & Cyber Security course in TU Dublin. While the overall course is mainly delivered online, there are some topics in this particular module which benefit from having a hands-on interactive element. The challenge though with facilitating learners to have that interactive experience is that the ones who cannot travel to campus should not be excluded. The mobile Hyflex project helped address this challenge by giving students both on campus and online a comparable interactive experience. Changes made to practice (100-150 words).

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Articles

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

Techmate: A Toolkit For Advancing Gender Equality In Computing Education, Alina Berry

Academic Posters Collection

To address the issue of gender inequality in computing education.

To inspire and guide institutions to implement change and track progress with easy to follow guidance.

To provide champions with useful and easy to access resources.

Identifying Subject Bias In Wifi-Based Human Activity Recognition Evaluation Methods, Amany Elkelany, Robert J. Ross, Susan Mckeever

Conference papers

WiFi-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has emerged as a promising approach for monitoring and analysing human activities in a non-intrusive manner, leveraging WiFi signals for activity classification. Despite advancements, existing WiFi-based HAR research lacks consideration of subject (human) bias. This results in learning models performing well on individuals used in the training samples but failing to generalise to new/unseen subjects, in contrast to known good practices in machine learning. In this paper, we address this oversight directly by systematically examining the evaluation methodology for the WiFi-based HAR context. Specifically, we investigate the impact of Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation (LOSOCV) in a hybrid …

On The Benefits Of Directness In Virtual Characters For Motivational Interviews, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Understanding the factors influencing successful engagement with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) remains a significant challenge. This understanding could be used to personalise agents to users to improve interactions. Some studies have shown that simulating personalities in healthcare agents can improve effectiveness and engagement. However, it is not yet well understood how variations of agent personality can be leveraged to improve user engagement with Motivational Interviewing (MI) ECAs. Specifically how the balance between agent warmth and directness can be controlled in an MI agent to improve likeability and engagement. We conducted an online Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of …

Grosafe: In-Classroom Technology-Enabled Solution To Build Societal Resilience Against Child Grooming, Christina Thorpe, Fiona Jennings

Conference Papers

GroSafe is an innovative initiative developed by TU Dublin in partnership with the ISPCC to address the critical issue of child grooming. By leveraging cutting-edge digital technologies, GroSafe focuses on educating children, caregivers, and educators to recognise, report, and prevent grooming behaviours. It integrates a 3D educational gaming environment with adaptive learning tools, enabling safe and effective engagement for children, including those with diverse learning needs. Designed to align with Ireland’s SPHE curriculum, GroSafe empowers schools and communities to tackle grooming through early intervention and resilience building.

Habit Coach: Customising Rag-Based Chatbots To Support Behavior Change, Arian Fooroogh Mand Arabi, Cansu Koyuturk, Michael O'Mahony, Raffaella Calati, Dimitri Ognibene

Conference papers

This paper presents the iterative development of Habit Coach, a GPT-based chatbot designed to support users in habit change through personalized interaction. Employing a user-centered design approach, we developed the chatbot using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, which enables behavior personalization without retraining the underlying language model (GPT-4). The system leverages document retrieval and specialized prompts to tailor interactions, drawing from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and narrative therapy techniques. A key challenge in the development process was the difficulty of translating declarative knowledge into effective interaction behaviors. In the initial phase, the chatbot was provided with declarative knowledge about CBT …

Getting To The Point: Contrasting Directness And Warmth In Motivational Embodied Conversational Agents, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Enhancing long-term engagement with conversational agents remains a significant challenge. Controlling the perceived warmth or directness of an agent’s personality through the style of its generated text could be used to increase user likeability. This paper reports an investigation of a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of a motivational embodied conversational agent to measure user perception of and attitudes towards warmth in interaction style. Results show a significant effect of users preferring an agent with a "more direct" personality for this scenario, though this effect is in many ways nuanced.

Inclusion4eu: Towards A Framework Of Inclusive Software Design Processes And Practices, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Emma Murphy, John Gilligan, Anna Becevel, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

This research is based on a trans-European research project aimed at enhancing software design and engineering practices to promote inclusivity, involving stakeholders from academia, industry, and disability advocacy services. To explore the nature and meaning of inclusion, a number of different approaches to inclusion are outlined, including models of equitable design (Accessible Design, Inclusive Design, Universal Design, and Design for All), User Design processes (Co-Production, Co-Creation, User-Centred Design, Co-Design, and Participatory Design), and Software Engineering Methodologies (Linear, Spiral, and Agile). These three categories of models are combined to form a three-dimensional environment in which software development projects can be mapped …

Designing Self-Management For And With Persons Living With Dementia Osullivan, Dympna, Dympna O'Sullivan, Michael Wilson, Damon Berry, Orla Moran, Siobhan O,Neill, Ciaran Nugent, Jonathan Turner, Julie Doyle

Articles

Promoting high quality of life for persons living with dementia has emerged as a central goal in global public health agendas. The emphasis has shifted from extending life to actively enhancing overall well-being by postponing or preventing additional disability. This represents a departure from traditional medical perspectives on dementia to a more socially-oriented approach, placing a strong focus on wellbeing.

In parallel, the concept of self-management for people with living dementia has emerged, where this is a person-centred approach in which the individual is empowered and has ownership over the management of their life and condition. Practice recommendations for person-centered …

Human Centered Approaches And Taxonomies For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Helen Sheridan, Emma Murphy, Dympna O'Sullivan

Conference papers

Recent interest within the research community related to explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has led to a profuse amount of literature on the subject. Those who wish to tackle the domain from an HCI focus may be presented with overwhelming material, most of which does not pertain to human aspects of XAI. Taxonomies can serve to categorize a subject into topic areas and distill content into an overview of the field. This late breaking work intends to help those within the HCI community with a focus on XAI to understand relevant aspects of human centered XAI. We also present a taxonomy …

Memories Of Recipes In Twentieth-Century Irish Cookbooks, Gary Thompson

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper analyses and categorises the ways in which authors and their publishers have chosen to include the author’s culinary, food and personal memories within the texts of twenty twentieth century Irish Cookbooks. Cookbooks are subjects of culinary nostalgia with the reading of a recipe capable of triggering in the reader a memory of a meal enjoyed, a dish cooked in times past by a loved one, or recollections of the disgust felt for a food hated in childhood. Independent from the reader, the culinary memories of the author can be captured at the time of publication in the text …

Using Chatgpt To Generate Gendered Language, Shweta Soundararajan, Manuela Nayantara Jeyaraj, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Gendered language is the use of words that denote an individual's gender. This can be explicit where the gender is evident in the actual word used, e.g. mother, she, man, but it can also be implicit where social roles or behaviours can signal an individual'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 use of gendered language in NLP systems can perpetuate gender stereotypes and bias. This paper proposes an approach to generating gendered language datasets using ChatGPT which will provide data for data-driven …

Spectralomics – Towards A Holistic Adaptation Of Label Free Spectroscopy, Hugh Byrne

Articles

Vibrational spectroscopy, largely based on infrared absorption and Raman scattering techniques, is much vaunted as a label free approach, delivering a high content, holistic characterisation of a sample, with demonstrable applications in a broad range of fields, from process analytical technologies and preclinical drug screening, to disease diagnostics, therapeutics, prognostics and personalised medicine. However, in the analysis of such complex systems, a trend has emerged in which spectral analysis is reduced to the identification of individual peaks, based on reference tables of assignments derived from literature, which are then interpreted as biomarkers. More sophisticated analysis attempts to unmix the spectrum …

Exploring The Design Of Low-End Technology To Increase Patient Connectivity To Electronic Health Records, Rens Kievit, Abdullahi Abubakar Kawu, Mirjam Van Reisen, Dympna O'Sullivan, Lucy Hederman

Conference papers

The tracking of the vitals of patients with long term health problems is essential for clinicians to determine proper care. Using Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) communicated remotely allows patients to be monitored without requiring frequent hospital visits. Issues might arise when the communication of data digitally is difficult or impossible due to a lack of access to internet or a low level of digital literacy as is the case in many African countries. The VODAN-Africa project (van Reisen et al., 2021) started in 2020 and has greatly increased the capabilities of clinics in different countries in both Africa and …

Building Societal Resilience Against Child Grooming Using Digital Technologies: The Solution Design, Christina Thorpe, Armin Shams, Matt Bowden

Conference Papers

Extended Abstract

Child grooming is when someone builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a child so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them, therefore building societal resilience against it is of prime importance1. Although progress has been made, it is among the yet unresolved challenges in Ireland (the focus of research). With direct SFI2 training support and using Theory of Change and Design Science as the methods for research and innovation, we have done extensive stakeholder analysis, and we keep doing it further such that a solution is evolved in order to create societal resilience against child grooming, …