News

We are pleased to congratulate Dr Attracta Brennan in our School on a new funding award as a co-PI with collaborators including Maire Connolly, Mary Dempsey, Lan Yang, Tingyan Wang (Oxford), Bryan Whelan (Manorhamilton hospital), Miriam O’Sullivan (Sligo hospital) and Carmel Silke (Manorhamilton hospital). Attracta’s contribution is in data analysis, scoring tool development, and dissemination.    Project title: Big Data Driven, Patient-Centric, Outcomes Scoring Tool Linking Multimorbidity, Fracture, Hosptialisation and Death for Patients with Osteoporosis  This project aims to develop a personalised patient-centered/informed outcomes scoring tool for the Irish population underpinned by multimorbidity indices and big-data analytics for predicting risk of fracture, hospitalisation, and death in osteoporosis patients with multimorbidity.  Multimorbidity (i.e. the co-occurrence of two or more chronic diseases within an individual) is common in people with osteoporosis, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, Covid-19, and dementia. These diseases share similar risk factors5. Multimorbidity profoundly negatively impacts risk, treatment, quality of life, and patient outcomes, and associated with higher all-cause mortality6. Studies exploring multimorbidity at a population-level demonstrate its importance, but the risk of fracture and adverse outcomes for individual patients with osteoporosis has not well addressed, or included in tools which include BMD. A patient-centred prediction approach, rather than ‘one size fits all’ approach for outcomes prediction in osteoporosis patients with multimorbidity, is particularly attractive for personalised health care and clinical management.    Fund: HRB SDAP 2023 - 250k - 2 year project

The National University of Ireland Galway seeks to recruit excellent candidates for up to 3 new academic posts in the School of Computer Science.  Follow our  link for full details on these exciting posts and their application deadlines. 

The School of Computer Science are very pleased to congratulate Chinmay Choudhary on his successful PhD viva yesterday (Thursday 25th May). Chinmay’s work was supervised by Dr Colm O’Riordan. Well done to you, also, Colm! Chinmay’s thesis is entitled “Cross-lingual Natural Language Processing with Linguistic Typology Knowledge”. In it, he has proposed a range of techniques to address the important problem of developing natural language processing technologies for low-resource languages, for which relatively small amounts of training data are available. The external examiner was Dr Edoardo M. Ponti, a lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. The internal examiner was Dr Bharathi Raja Asoka Chakravarthi, a lecturer here in the School of Computer Science, University of Galway. Head of the School of Computer Science, Professor Michael Madden, chaired the viva. We are grateful to Edoardo and Bharathi for their thorough examination of the work. This was a hybrid viva, with the external examiner attending remotely. Congratulations again, Chinmay!  

The School of Computer Science' Research Students will be presenting publicly in connection with this year's Graduate Research Committee (GRC) process, on Monday 22nd May and Tuesday 23rd May 2023 in IT125G, Ground Floor, Computer Science Building.  The GRC presentation is a great opportunity for Research students to present their work to peers, gain experience of public speaking and offers the opportunity for all to understand the research that is being undertaken in the School.  The schedule for both days can be found at this link: GRC 2023

The School of Computer Science is delighted to congratulate Nicola McDonnell on successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday afternoon.  Nicola was supervised by Prof. Jim Duggan and Dr Enda Howley. Her thesis is entitled “Leveraging Nature-inspired Techniques to Semi-automate the Design of Multi-agent Systems”, and proposed a range of evolutionary computing and reinforcement learning algorithms for developing communications protocols for multi-agent systems, with applications in the highly topical area of optimising resource usage in cloud computing centres. We are very grateful to the external examiner, Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Full Professor in the University of Geneva (201-250 World Rankings) and Director of U. Geneva’s Interfaculty Research Centre in Informatics, whose expertise is in self-organising and emergent systems, and founder of the journal ACM Transactions on Autonomous Adaptive Systems. We are also grateful to the internal examiner, Dr Enda Barrett of the School of Computer Science here in University of Galway. Head of School, Prof. Michael Madden chaired the viva.  Of course, well done also to Jim and Enda as the supervisors. 

The AtlanTec Festival, Ireland’s annual tech community festival, opens on 8 May, 2023. The two-week festival is supported by University of Galway and orchestrated by the non-profit association itag (Innovation Technology AtlanTec Gateway).  Now in its ninth year, this year’s theme is ‘Connected Future – Unlocking the Potential of a Digitally Connected World’.   A packed programme of events is planned, including group meet-ups, talks, sporting events and an ‘unconference’ looking equity of opportunity.  Key highlights of the festival will also include the AI Summit, Cloud Native Summit and Tech Leaders’ Summit, which will be co-hosted by University of Galway on the 17 and 18 of May.  Most of the events are free and registration is via www.atlantec.ie

A grant has been awarded to Dr Attracta Brennan to support the Happy Maths project. Dr Attracta Brennan is the Co-Investigator with Dr Pierpaolo Dondio from TU Dublin on an SFI Discover programme project: “Happy Maths: Reducing Maths Anxiety with Game-based Learning”. It has budget of €201,800 over 24 months. Attracta’s contribution will fund a research assistant under her mentorship, and Attracta is also involved in programme delivery and evaluation in Galway. Other Co-PIs include Aoibhinn ni Shuilleabhain (UCD) and Denis O'Hora (School of Psychology, University of Galway).  Happy Maths is a programme for primary schools students, teachers and parents to raise awareness about Maths Anxiety and how game-based learning can mitigate its negative effect.Maths Anxiety is “a debilitating negative emotional reaction towards mathematics” affecting 1 in 6 students. It is more severe in girls than boys, thereby worsening the existing problem of gender inequality in STEM education.

With recent developments in large language models, particularly GPT-4 and ChatGPT, the School of Computer Science has been working actively to explore their impacts and implications. In an article on 21 March 2023 in the Journal, Dr James McDermott (Computer Science), Professor Michael Madden (Computer Science) and Dr Iain MacLabhrainn (CELT) explore how ChatGPT is sweeping academia and ask what should be done. On 22 March, the School of Computer Science and itag organised an industry-academic AI Forum meetup entitled “ChatGPT – Opportunity or Threat?”. Dr McDermott gave a thought-provoking presentation about ChatGPT, and then there was a discussion panel moderated by Gerry Carty of HPE, with panel members Prof Michael Madden (University of Galway), Ms Fiona Veazey (Fidelity Investments) Dr Natalia Resende (University of Galway) and Dr Maciej Dabrowski (Genesys). This was a well-attended event with a great amount of questions from the audience. On 27 March, Prof. Michael Madden published an article for The Conversation about how ChatGPT struggles at Wordle, and what that reveals about how large language models work internally: https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-struggles-with-wordle-puzzles-which-says-a-lot-about-how-it-works-201906 This was picked up by a wide number of news websites, including the New York Post on 29 March. On 29 March, Prof. Madden was interviewed in an Irish Times article about ChatGPT and how it may impact university teaching and learning. On 31 March, Prof. Madden was interviewed by John Moore of “Moore in the Morning”, Toronto’s most-listened to morning radio show on Newstalk 1010. ‌‌

The School of Computer Science are very pleased to congratulate Abdul Tipu on defending his PhD thesis yesterday afternoon which was held over Zoom. Abdul’s thesis is entitled “HPC IO and Seismic Data Performance Optimization using ANNs Prediction based Auto-tuning” and explored an interesting area of optimising aspects of high performance computing data input/output, relating to his work in ICHEC. His supervisor is Dr Enda Howley in the School of Computer Science.   The external examiner for this thesis was Prof. Suren Byna, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State University, and formerly a Senior Computer Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The internal examiner was our colleague Dr Michael Schukat of the School of CS.  Well done, Abdul!

The School of Computer Science are delighted to congratulate Kevin McDonnell on successfully defending his PhD thesis yesterday afternoon. This was a hybrid viva, with the external examiner attending remotely and everybody else present in person.  Kevin’s thesis Kevin’s thesis is entitled “Machine Learning for De Novo Peptide Identification”. His research work is highly multidisciplinary in nature, supervised by Dr Enda Howley of the School of Computer Science and Dr Florence Abram of the School of Biological & Chemical Sciences, and the work developed novel deep learning approaches for proteomics. The external examiner for this thesis was Prof. Bernhard Renard, the Professor and Chair for Data Analytics and Computational Statistics in the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany, and the Professor and Dean of Studies in the Department of Digital Engineering, University of Potsdam. The internal examiner was Dr Enda Barrett, a lecturer here in the School of Computer Science.    Congratulations, Kevin, and well done also Enda and Florence!

Applications are invited for research bursaries for undergraduate students wishing to pursue a 6 week summer research project in the School of Computer Science, starting on the 5th June 2023. Two scholarships are available, each with a bursary of 2,000 euro.  Application Deadline: Sunday, 30th April 2023 at midnight These internship bursaries are available to all undergraduate students in University of Galway and other Irish HEI’s who have a significant computing aspect to their degree. Students who are already undertaking a funded placement/internship are ineligible to apply. Final year students are eligible to apply. Eligible supervisors are listed below under the Possible Project Descriptions section. Candidates should make contact directly with a prospective supervisor to discuss a project and to arrange for the submission of the required recommendation by the prospective supervisor.  The academic Co-ordinator is Dr Karl Mason.  

University of Galway's Threesis Grand Finale will be held next Thursday 1st December at 5pm in the O’ Donoghue Theatre. Congratulations to Muzhaffar Hazman, whose PhD is being supervised by Josephine Griffith in the School of CS, and Jaleed Khan, whose PhD is being supervised by Ed Curry in DSI. They are two of just 12 finalists who will be participating in the Threesis finale.  A summary sentence on Muz's research subject: Memes, combining image and text, are a prominent form of communication on the modern web, and present novel challenges to automated analysis, for example for content moderation and hate speech detection.  Each of our contestants will share the story of their research using just three slides, in three minutes, in front of our three judges - Dr Lisa Keating, (Director of Research & Innovation, Irish Universities Association), John Crumlish (Galway International Arts Festival), and Dr Sylvia Maretto (Research Office, University of Galway). Our MC for the evening will be Dr Jessamyn Fairfield (Physics, University of Galway). It’s set to be a great evening of equally inspiring, entertaining and impactful research with the audience getting to vote for their favourite speaker on the night. Please book your free ticket now to secure your seat here on our Eventbrite page.

A researcher at the National College of Ireland recently came up with an idea for an app to allow researchers examine social cognition using a touch-screen interface and realistic videos of actors interacting.  cTOM was designed in collaboration with Professor Gary Donohoe, Professor of Psychology at National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), and the code was developed by Professor. Jim Duggan, Conor O’Grady, and Jennifer Murray from NUIG’s School of Computer Science. The app is currently being used in research being conducted at NUI Galway and UCD.  Full press release article :  Novel App Launched to Test Social Cognition - Irish Tech News 

The School of Computer Science is very pleased to congratulate Sarwar Ghulam on successfully defending his PhD thesis in a thorough and extensive viva voce examination. The viva was held online on Monday 13th June.   Sarwar’s PhD thesis is entitled “Usage of Passage Based Evidence in Information Retrieval Tasks”, and focused on techniques for more accurate retrieval of information from documents by considering the relevance of passages within them. Sarwar’s work was supervised by Dr Colm O’Riordan with co-supervision by Prof. John Newell.   The external examiner was Prof. Mourad Oussalah, who is a Research Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering in the University of Oulu in Finland. The internal examiner was Dr Josephine Griffith from the School of Computer Science here NUI Galway, and Dr. Michael Madden was the chair Congratulations again, Sarwar!  

Prof Michael Madden is one of the signatories to a letter in the Irish Times newspaper of 2 June 2022, recommending against recent a government proposal for An Garda Siochana (the Irish police force) making use of facial recognition technologies: Garda use of facial recognition technologies unnecessary and disproportionate – The Irish Times This follows on from an interview he did last week with the Irish Times, in which he expressed his personal view that there are several problems with AI-based facial recognition: Facial recognition technology ‘not advanced enough’ for use by Garda – The Irish Times Issues he noted included: - Systems are not as accurate in practice as vendors claim; - Many systems rely on names and photos harvested without informed consent from sites such as LinkedIn and social media sites; - Systems also use names and photos uploaded from police records, which is potentially a mis-use of data under GDPR; - Vendors are not transparent about the algorithms and data they use, but analysis of other face datasets has shown that they disproportionately contain images of Caucasian males, leading to poorer performance on other groups.

The School of Computer Science are delighted to congratulate Xue Yang, who won the best Cybersecurity Student Project Award at the At the ITAG Excellence Awards Ceremony on Friday 13 May. This was in recognition of her M.Sc. (Data Analytics) thesis project, where Xue applied Reinforcement Learning to the Flipit Game as a means of modelling APT cybersecurity attacks. Her project was jointly supervised by Dr. Michael Schukat and Dr. Enda Howley in Computer Science.   Xue is now in the first year of her PhD studies, where she continues her research under the guidance of Enda and Michael, funded by a College Scholarship. Her PhD is in the area of applying Reinforcement Learning to cloud datacentre security.  

The National University of Ireland Galway seeks to recruit excellent candidates for up to 5 new academic posts in the School of Computer Science.  Follow our  link for full details on these exciting posts and their application deadlines. 

The School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome another academic Dr Takfarinas Saber to NUI Galway and the School of Computer Science! Takfarinas, who takes up his Lecturer Above the Bar, joins us from University College Dublin where he had been working as a lecturer in the School of Computer Science. His research is in the area of complex software engineering systems, and he applies techniques from AI and Operations Research to improve their performance and trustworthiness. Biography: He is a Funded-Investigator in Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software. His area of expertise is in the optimisation of Complex Software Engineering Systems. He designs and applies novel Artificial Intelligence techniques from Machine Learning, Operations Research, and Evolutionary Computation/Learning to improve the Performance and Trustworthiness of such systems. Previously, he has held the position of lecturer both in the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU) and in the School of Computer Science at Dublin City University (UCD). He has also held a Post-doctoral Researcher position at the Natural Computing Research & Applications Group at Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, UCD. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2017 from UCD, Ireland. His PhD topic is Multi-objective Optimisation of Large-Scale Data Centres. He obtained both his BSc in Computer Science and his MSc in Computer Science, track: Optimisation In Operations Research from the University of Nantes, France.

Following a recent round of lecturer vacancies, the School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome a new academic to the faculty member, Dr Mamoona Asghar, who started as a Lecturer above the Bar. Mamoona joins us from TU Shannon (formerly Athlone IT) where she was a Marie Curie research fellow working in the area of cybersecurity. Mamoona has previous lecturing experience in Ireland, UK, and Pakistan.  Biography  Dr. Mamoona Asghar (Senior Member, IEEE) received a Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, U.K., in 2013. She has more than fifteen years of lecturing experience at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Pakistan, UK and Ireland. Presently she is working as Lecturer (Above the Bar) in the School of Computer Science, College of Science and Engineering, National University of Ireland Galway. Before joining NUI Galway, she was working as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSC) Career-Fit Research Fellow (June 2018, August 2021) and Lecturer (August 2021 to December 2021) in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering & Informatics, Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest, Athlone Campus, Ireland. Her MSC fellowship research targets the proposals and implementation of technological solutions for visual privacy of CCTV Surveillance systems under the European General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR). She has published several ISI indexed journal articles along with numerous international conference papers. She is actively involved in reviewing research articles for renowned journals/conferences and has participated as a session chair. Her research interests include security aspects of multimedia (image, audio, and video), compression, visual privacy, encryption, steganography, secure transmission in future networks, video quality metrics, key management schemes, computer vision algorithms, and deep learning models.  

Following the recent round of lecturer vacancies, the School of Computer Science is delighted to welcome it's newest member of academic faculty, Dr Ihsan Ullah. Dr Ihsan worked as postdoc in Computer Science and DSI for several years. More recently, he has been working in UCD in the CeADAR research centre.  Dr Ihsan Ullah's biography:  Dr. Ihsan Ullah did his Ph.D. in the University of Milan, specializing in designing lightweight deep neural network architectures with the pyramidal approach. He has more than nine years of research and development experience in applying Deep Learning to a variety of images, video, text, and time-series recognition problems while working with renowned labs in the US (Computational Vision and Geometry Lab at Stanford University), Europe (at CVPR Lab at the University of Naples Parthenope, Italy), and the Middle East (Visual Computing Lab in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia). Before joining the School of Computer Science in NUI Galway, he was a Senior Research Data Scientist in CeADAR Ireland's Centre for Applied AI in University College Dublin where he was the head of the Special Projects group and was actively involved in applying for various national and international fundings e.g., Horizon Europe, SFI, EI. Prior to that, he worked in NUI Galway as a Senior Postdoc, Adjunct Lecturer, and Project Manager of the H2020 project ‘ROCSAFE’. He also worked as a Postdoc at INSIGHT Research Centre in NUI Galway and Research Engineer in Prosa Srl Italy. Currently, his main areas of research interest are in designing lightweight deep learning models, computer vision and Pattern Recognition, explainable AI, federated learning, and differential privacy. He is an invited member of the National Standards Authority of Ireland prestigious ‘Top Team” on setting the national Standards in AI, and he is a steering committee member of Oblivious.ai.

School of Computer Science is very pleased to welcome back Prof. Ed Curry, who is taking up his new role as Director of the Data Science Institute.  Ed was a former lecturer in the School and did his PhD here with the School also.  Ed rejoined NUI Galway on December 1st, from NUI Maynooth where he had been Professor in the Hamilton Institute. Ed played a leading role in the SFI Insight centre within DSI, as he will continue to do now on his return.  

The School of Computer Science recently ran a very successful virtual Computer Science Experience Day for Transition Year students in county Galway, on Friday October 22nd, 2021. This event was funded through the HEA ICT Camps initiative.  347 students took part in this year’s virtual event, from 8 different Galway (both city and county) schools, with essentially a 50/50 breakdown between male and female participation (50.1% Males and 49.9% Females).   On the day students participated in 4 workshop sessions which covered Visual Design, Web Programming, 3D Modeling and AI Music. Students had opportunities to submit mini projects throughout the day.  The event was organised by Karen Young in collaboration with the School Admin team (Anne Kinneen, Deirdre King and Ger Healy), one of our Technical Officers (Joe O’Connell), 7 other members of academic staff (Enda Howley, Josephine Griffith, Attracta Brennan, Sam Redfern, Frank Glavin, James McDermott and Adrian Clear), and 4 student ambassadors from the School of Computer Science. 

Dr. Sam Redfern, Lecturer in the School of Computer Science was interviewed by twinkle.ie in recent months. In the interview which is available at the link below Sam gives his thoughts on why coding is an important skill for young children.   https://www.twinkl.ie/blog/why-coding-is-an-important-skill-for-children 

The Times Higher Education world university rankings for 2022 were recently released and in the subject of Computer Science, NUI Galway is ranked joint top in Ireland, along with UCD and TCD.  All three are in the 201-250 band.  World University Rankings 2022 by subject: computer science | Times Higher Education (THE)

A team led by an NUI Galway academic which predicted three years ago the risk of a global pandemic was “greater now than every before” has been awarded €10 million to help develop robust systems to respond to future pandemics.  Such systems include resource-modelling tools, for example, predicting the quantity of personal protective equipment (PPE) needed or beds that would be required. This aspect of Pandem-2’s research will be led by Prof Jim Duggan of the School of Computer Science in NUIG. His team will develop a resource modelling tool, Pandem-Cap, which will be an IT dashboard for resource modelling. “It will host pandemic-relevant data from across Europe,” said Prof Duggan. “It will help pandemic managers to build capacity and develop operational strategy for any future pandemic that may arise.” "it’s an exciting collaboration between the School of Medicine, the School of Computer Science, and the Data Science Institute, and our 18 other partners across Europe. I also like to acknowledge the contributions and roles of colleagues Paul Buitelaar and Conor Hayes, who are also working on data analytics innovations for PANDEM-2. "  Full article available from the Irish Times Video Promo    

Two NUI Galway students have been awarded scholarships by multinational technology company Intel as part of its programme to encourage the next generation of high-achieving women. The successful students are Eimear McDonnell, from Westport, Co Mayo, in third year BSc Environmental Health and Safety and Emily Metadjer, from Shrule, Co Mayo, in second year BSc Computer Science and Information Technology. The Intel Women in Technology scholarship programme aims to encourage a new generation of high-achieving women to take up the challenge of a career in science and technology and to empower them by fostering educational opportunities. Professor Michael Madden, Head of NUI Galway’s School of Computer Science, said: “We are delighted that Emily has secured this scholarship. We are very keen to support young women, as they are under-represented in the field of Computer Science nationally and internationally. As well as the financial award, the scholarship includes mentoring, which is valuable for nurturing the talent of young women and helping them to achieve their high potential.” Eimly Metadjer said: “"I am extremely grateful to have received this scholarship from Intel, one of the foremost tech companies in the world. This is not just a huge opportunity for me personally, but this scholarship is extremely important to help bridge the gender gap in computer science and to encourage and enable women in technology.” The Intel Women in Technology scholarship program offers a monetary grant, valued at €3,000 per annum, as well as opportunities for work placements at the Intel Leixlip and Shannon campuses. Each scholar is also assigned a mentor who is an Intel employee to assist and provide advice on managing their academic career. Since the Intel Women in Technology scholarship program began 15 years ago, it has supported 129 students and a total of €1,675,000 has been invested in the initiative to date. Related Press release on Intel newsroom Press release on Engineers Ireland