Congratulations to our recent PhD and research MSc graduates
The School of Computer Science warmly congratulates the PhD and research MSc students who formally graduated on December 1, 2020. Warm congratulations to their supervisors as well!
Although there was no formal conferring ceremony due to covid, we hope that we will be able to mark their achievement face to face in 2021.
Ayidh Alharbi - supervisor Prof Tahar Kechadi
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Secure Steganography Channel for Minimising Insider Threat
“While security is often obtained by encryption, it is not sufficient in applications where the existence of a transmission arouses suspicion. For instance, this is the case in the presence of insider threats or military communications. In these cases, the main idea is to hide the existence of transmissions, (covert communications). Steganography is a form of covert communication and involves the use of any medium to hide messages. My research involves the development of a steganographic system, which can automatically choose the medium to send the message reliably to the destination. I have developed a process for information hiding, evaluated and studied its reliability under extreme conditions.”
Mark Belford - supervisor Asst Prof Derek Greene
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Challenges in the Evaluation of Topic Modeling Solutions
"Topic modeling is a machine learning approach for automatically identifying the key themes and trends in large collections of text documents, such as news archives. My research has involved developing new models for discovering more insightful topics, and proposing accompanying techniques for evaluating the usefulness of these results and for helping users to understand and interpret them."
Caroline Byrne - supervisor Assoc Prof Rem Collier
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Investigation of minimally sufficient sensorisation for effective Activity of Daily Living (ADL) recognition in delivering reassurance to caregivers
“Our research evaluated the efficacy of several User Interfaces (UI's) which were specifically designed for displaying information to caregivers of the elderly. It assessed which graphical format for visualising Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) was the easiest to understand when different time-line information was being displayed. Further to this, it investigated the minimal number/type of sensors required to effectively monitor the activities of elders within their own homes. Through ADLs systems, healthcare and interactive social media systems the independent lives of our older adults can be maintained within their own homes.”
Xiaoyu Du - supervisor Asst Prof Mark Scanlon
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Alleviating the Digital Forensic Backlog: A Methodology for Automated Digital Evidence Processing
“To alleviate the digital forensic backlog, my research describes a cloud-based deduplicated digital evidence processing framework. The server preserves analysis result of previously encountered artefacts, which helps avoid the repeated re-acquisition, re-storage, and re-analysis of common evidence during investigations. My research also explores leveraging machine learning techniques for file artefacts relevancy prioritisation based on files’ content, metadata and timeline events.”
Thomas Mildner - supervisor Assoc Prof Tony Veale
Award - Master of Science (MSc)
Title of research: Scéalability - Assessing Multi-Agent Storytelling Performances With Amazon’s Alexa
“Our research introduces Scéalability, a multi-agent system of cooperative actors with unique affordances that share the task of delivering a tale in different forms. The performances range from enacting robots to speech devices that narrate events. Scéalability explores the value of artificial agents both as narrators and as actors, and considers how design techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) can make the system an interactive experience.”
Manaz Kaleel - supervisor Assoc Prof Gianluca Pollastri, co-supervisor Asst Prof Catherine Mooney
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Improving Protein Structure and Subcellular Localization Prediction using Deep Learning
“I developed Deep Learning techniques which I applied to several problems in the protein structural and functional space, including protein secondary structure, solvent accessibility and subcellular localisation prediction. Each of these problems is important, and webservers for predicting these properties process hundreds of thousands of queries from all over the world, helping advance research in molecular evolution, the study of protein-protein interaction networks, and computational drug design.”
Evan O'Keeffe - supervisor Prof Eleni Mangina, co-supervisor Prof Debra F.Laefer
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Multi-Mode Control of Multiple, Synchronised Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)
“My research was about how to create a new radio system that could control, in a scalable manor, multiple UAVs (drones). This work would allow the UAV industry to scale using software methods over expensive hardware scaling, which would be beneficial for operations such as search and rescue and parcel delivery.”
Asanka Priyadarshana Sayakkara - supervisor Asst Prof Nhien-An Le-Khac, co-supervisor Asst Prof Mark Scanlon
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis Methods for Digital Forensics on Internet of Things
“Digital forensic insight acquisition from Internet of Things (IoT) devices is currently a challenging task due to the lack of standard interfaces on these devices. My research explored the potential of using the electromagnetic (EM) radiation from IoT devices as a novel window to extract forensic insights. The experimental findings indicate that forensic insights can be acquired through EM radiation effectively during triage examination phase, opening new opportunities for digital investigations in the future.”
Arsalan Shahid - supervisor Assoc Prof Alexey Lastovetsky
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Towards Reliable and Accurate Energy Predictive Modelling using Performance Events on Modern Computing Platforms
“Energy efficiency in ICT is becoming a grand technological challenge and is now a first-class design constraint in all computing settings. My thesis explores the energy measurement, modelling, and optimization methods in modern multicore computing platforms and presents a theory of energy predictive models for computing that has also been experimentally demonstrated to have a significant impact on their accuracy and reliability.”
Mirko Torrisi - supervisor Assoc Prof Gianluca Pollastri
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Predicting Protein Structural Annotations by Deep and Shallow Learning
"In my thesis I developed state of the art algorithms based on Deep and Shallow Learning methods to predict various structural properties of proteins, and proposed revised protocols for their assessment. My work resulted in several predictors, in the form of web servers and public domain software, that are widely used by the Bioinformatics research community, contributing to advancements in our knowledge of life at a molecular level."
Bao Trinh - supervisor: Prof Liam Murphy
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Balancing Quality of Service and Energy Efficiency for Video Delivery in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks
"The trade-off between Energy Efficiency and Quality of Service is a critical issue in many Internet of Things (IoT) systems. This thesis tackles such problems by proposing a set of novel network protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, one of the pillars of many IoT systems, which aim to equip sensor nodes with the capability to adapt their operations intelligently without human intervention."
Hamed Z. Jahromi - supervisor Asst Prof Andrew Hines, co-supervisor : Asst Prof Declan Delaney
Award - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Title of research: Quality of Experience for Interactive Web Applications
“I utilised user studies to develop new robust metrics, models and methodologies for QoE estimation of interactive web applications. My research extends the understanding of interactive web applications QoE for the effective optimisation and management of network/system resources. It paves the way for service providers to passively observe the performance of web applications and be aware of quality problems before they impact end-users.”
Commenting on their achievements Associate Professor Georgiana Ifrim, Director of Graduate Research in the School of Computer Science at UCD said “We commend the resilience and motivation of our students to complete their research programme under extremely difficult circumstances triggered by the covid19 pandemic worldwide. We currently have more than 140 registered research students and we had 24 research students graduating in 2020. This is an extraordinary achievement for the students and their supervisors and we warmly congratulate them on the occasion of the formal graduation event in December 2020.”
Research study at the School of Computer Science
Academic staff and researchers in the School have made many important research contributions in a broad range of research areas. We are active in Computer Security, Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Digital Health, Foundations of Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Systems, Intelligent Sensing and Multimedia, Software Engineering and Distributed Systems, as well as Emerging Topics such as ethics and sustainability.
We currently have over 100 postgraduate research students, and the School has a strong international flavor, with students and academic staff from around the world. https://www.ucd.ie/cs/study/researchdegrees/