Category Archives: research

Oct 2006 CASCON 2006

I have been the Program Chair for the Dublin CASCON 2006 Dublin Symposium this year

Sept 2006 New Honours Student

Cheryl-Anne Harding has started her honours project on TableTop Information Visualisation and Darin Eagan has started his on 3D MPEG Encoding Visualisation with me.

Sept 2006 Luke O’Malley starts as postgrad

Luke O’Malley, has started with me as a Lero MSc scholar

Aug 2006 ODCSSS Final Research Day

The Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School (Odysseus or ODCSSS) 2006 brought together 17 students from around Ireland, Europe and the USA. The grand finale research day was held on Aug 25 2006. This undergraduate summer research program has been held between the School of Computer Science & Informatics at University College Dublin and the School of Computing at Dublin City University and is supported by the Adaptive Information Cluster. [More]

July 2006 Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland Article

Quoted in a piece on Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland, Issue 3 Vol 37.

Automotive software (Automobile Sector) is an expanding area of software engineering and embedded systems research and development. Within the next five years, premium cars are expected to host a cumulated amount of up to one gigabyte of binary code of software deployed via a set of interconnected embedded platforms. Software developers already working in other domains like industrial automation systems and embedded telecommunications systems can readily transfer their skills to the automotive software sector . The Irish government via the Science Foundation Ireland has funded the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre Lero with a focus on automotive software engineering (our focus in UCD is on Software Product Lines, Visualisation and Autonomic Software Systems). To design, implement and manage the complexity of such a huge, heterogeneous distributed system with increasingly short innovation cycles and a vast installed base, neither the techniques and methods of classical embedded systems are suitable, nor the known ones in the desktop and business software domain. “Automotive Software Engineering is a good example of how the Irish full end-to-end knowledge economy can be marshalled, in short order, for a high growth and high value area…The standard will be built around globally distributed software development using next generation visualisation tools in the development of autonomic automotie systems”. To tackle this challenge, we need newly adapted software engineering methods for the automotive domain that allow to specifically design the different software types, corresponding to their requirements, and to later on integrate the system parts into one reliable and manageable system. A specific example of this is the move from proprietary software architectures to industry wide standards. Current automotive systems consist of different electronic control units, a controller area network, sensors and actuators. Current industry wide efforts include a group developing the open standard AUTOSAR, which aims to have a common automotive architecture for developing vehicular software, user interfaces and management.

References

http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/pretscha/events/seas05/
Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland, Issue 3, Vol 37, July/August 2006

Lero – The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.

Books

Automotive Software Engineering: Principles, Processes, Methods, and Tools

Conferences:

June 2006 Imaging, Visualisation & Graphics laboratory launch

IVG Lab Launch
We held the launch of the Imaging, Visualisation & Graphics laboratory in the School of Computer Science and Informatics with the support of Computer Services UCD. This launch was attended by UCD President, Vice President for Research, Vice President for Innovation, researchers from IBM and Intel along with academics from Conway Institute, Archaeology and Mechanical Engineering.

May 2006 Pervasive 2006 State Reception

4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing State Reception hosted by Minister of State Tom Kitt in Dublin Castle who gave this welcoming speech which I helped to write and awarded the best paper prize. Minister Kitt was introduced by Philip Nolan, UCD registrar.

Thank you very much for your generous welcome. In particular, I would like to thank the hosts of this prestigious event – The Systems Research Group, in University College Dublin – and, indeed, all the corporate partners that have made this event possible.

It is interesting, I think, that so many people from Ireland – academia and our public and private sectors – have come together to support the conference – and to engage with their international counterparts in exploring this fascinating concept – Pervasive Computing. I am delighted that Ireland is hosting this conference. It is fair to say – I think – that modern Ireland is a very good fit for this event – both in terms of logistics – and in our closeness to the central theme of the conference – integrating ICT into the everyday environment.

It is a particuar pleasure for me to have been invited to speak this evening – because, as Minister for the Information Society – I have a keen interest in how technology can be applied – how and where they can add value – how they can enhance productivity – and, I suppose, how they can improve the quality of life….

[Read Full Speech]