MSC COMPUTER SCIENCE

Dr Adam Winstanley
Head of Department
Location-based services for environmental monitoring and public information systems; transport information systems; public transport tracking, monitoring and analysis software; journey planners optimised on multiple criteria; passenger information systems; graphics recognition using shape, context, and Statistical Language Modelling for recognition and validation of graphical objects; electric vehicle control systems.

Dr Aidan Mooney
Aidan Mooney’s primary research interests lie in the area of chaos theory, image processing, information hiding and watermarking. His interests in watermarking cover digital and audio watermarking and developing new techniques for secure trustworthy systems. He has special interest in the use of chaos theory to provide more secure watermark generation techniques within different domains.

Prof Barak Pearlmutter
Barak Pearlmutter’s primary technical interest is in systems that adapt: how to analyse them, how to understand them, how to build them. Because the most flexible and competent adaptive systems available is the nervous system, he is interested in artificial neural networks and computational neuroscience. He is most focused on the construction of novel architectures and algorithms that enable us to understand and attack previously unassailable problems, and to understand previously mysterious aspects of nervous system function. A secondary interest of Prof Pearlmutter is in programming systems, especially advanced programming language design and implementation. One of his projects is to build a new efficient advanced programming language with novel constructs that allow many numeric algorithms and scientific computations to be expressed very clearly and succinctly.

Dr Charles Markham
Charles Markham is currently collaborating with the Engineering Department at Maynooth University to develop a brain computer interface based on optical tomography. The work involves developing accurate methods of photometry to allow blood oxygen levels to be measured and so infer brain activity. In collaboration with the Vision Groups, Institute for Technology. Blanchardstown and Maynooth University Dr Markham is developing a mobile computer vision system. This project has created interest from the National Roads Authority for road infrastructure management. The Vision Group (Maynooth University) is also investigating the use of sensor fusion to improve performance of pedestrian detection systems. Initial work has been carried out using a combined LIDAR and Vision System as part of the autotram project. Dr Markham has special interest in the design of novel imaging sensors. He has developed techniques for infrared imaging using coded apertures and wide-baseline stereo imaging methods to achieve a visual radar system.

Mr Dermot Kelly
Distributed Systems, the Internet and its application to the emergence of virtual societies, grid computing, e-commerce and database backed services, mobile internet services, multimedia delivery, collaborative applications, network centric games, virtual reality environments and remote monitoring and control. Entertainment Technology Systems for sound and lighting resources, analysing and synthesising, visualising and controlling these resources.

Dr Diarmuid O Donoghue
Dr Diarmuid O’Donoghue’s research is focused on Evolutionary Algorithms with Genetic Repair for constrained optimisation. We are exploring biologically inspired models of genetic repair that enforce constraints on the evolutionary search process. Of special interest is the genetic repair process proposed in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Nature 434, 505–509). This controversial finding asserts that plants repair genetic errors using a ‘cache’ of genetic information passed down from one of its ancestors. This repair process effects a type of non-Mendelian inheritance, challenging the assumption that underlies so much of natural and simulated evolution (for an accessible introduction to the natural repair process see here). Our work makes two distinct contributions. First we are developing very efficient general-purpose algorithms for solving constraint problems. Secondly, we are exploring the plausibility of the proposed repair mechanism through our computational experiments. Another of Diarmuid’s interests is in computational models of how people solve problems using analogical
comparisons. Algorithmic models are based on isomorphic structure mapping between the source and target analogs – represented as a pair of k-edge and j-node coloured graphs. We have also adapted these algorithms to recognise targeted structures in topographic maps, allowing the automatic identification of complex multi-polygon geo-spatial structures like schools and hospitals.

Mr John McDonald
John McDonald’s research interests lie in the areas of computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and visual simultaneous positioning and mapping. In the past he has worked on topics ranging from face recognition and facial expression analysis, to 3-dimensional and holographic image processing, and intelligent vehicle systems. More recently his work has focussed on visual positioning and mapping. This work can be divided into two lines of investigation: (i) building viewpoint independent descriptions of the appearance of a scene and then using those descriptions to recognise new images of that scene, and, (ii) using a live video stream from a mobile (e.g. handheld or robot mounted) camera to infer the 3D structure of the scene that the camera is viewing, and the movement of the camera within that scene. This second area is sometimes referred to as visual simultaneous localisation and mapping or vSLAM. Some of the applications of this research include life-long autonomous mobile robotics, augmented reality (i.e. virtual reality over live video streams), and visually assisted user navigation.

Dr James Power
James Power works with the Principles of Programming research group which specialises in the static and dynamic analysis of object-oriented programs and programming languages. We exploit a variety of techniques, such as parsing, bytecode analysis, software metrics, meta-modelling and program verification to model software systems in order to increase comprehensibility and reliability. Our work has applications in reverse engineering, program verification and validated forward engineering from design to code. We have a strong interest in the formal underpinnings of software technology, and much of our work has links with formal methods in program design and analysis.

Dr Joseph Timoney
Joseph Timoney’s field of research is Digital audio signal processing with an emphasis towards music technology and multimedia applications. Specifically, current work as part of the Music Technology Research Group is in the field of sound synthesis. Research is being carried out in emulations of the elements of analog subtractive synthesis for virtual-analog applications, physical modeling of acoustic instruments, and enhanced Phase Distortion synthesis. Other areas of interest are derived from all aspects of Timbral modeling. The outcome of this research is in the building of VST software instruments or standalone applications. At the moment the group has academic collaboration with the TKK in Espoo, Finland and commercial collaboration with the Irish-owned Future Audio Workshop. Another research strand is in the area of Gaelic speech synthesis and speech rhythm modeling using the perceptual centers of sounds. This work is in collaboration with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Maynooth University.

Dr Philip Maguire
Phil Maguire’s main research interests are in the area