Author: oneillm

As part of the Science Foundation Ireland funded Reg-Fr-AIMs project we are seeking applications for a number of PhD scholarships to be based at University College Dublin’s Natural Computing Research & Applications Group in Artificial Intelligence.

The Reg-Fr-AIMs project is a collaboration between the teams of Prof Fergal McCaffery (Regulated Software Research Centre in Dundalk Institute of Technology) and Prof Michael O’Neill (University College Dublin). At UCD the collaborating faculty and doctoral supervisory team includes Dr Annunziata Esposito Amideo and Dr Miguel Nicolau.

Reg-Fr-AIMs sets out to develop a Regulatory Compliance Framework for Trustworthy AI Medical Device Software. This includes research into adaptive, trustworthy and compliant AI technology. To this end, the research to be undertaken at UCD has a strong focus on adaptive representations for machine learning, optimisation and reasoning.

These full-time PhD studentship comprise an annual stipend of €18,500 for 4 years, postgraduate fees and a contribution towards direct research costs. Successful candidates will typically hold a minimum 2:1 Honours Degree in a Software, Computer Science, Analytics or closely related cognate discipline. All applicants are required to demonstrate a high level of competence in the English language.
 
Applicants should forward a copy of your CV and a one-page cover letter in PDF format outlining (i) your suitability for this position and (ii) your motivation for applying to Prof Michael O’Neill. The initial deadline for submission of application is 24th March 2023, however, applications will be reviewed on a continuous basis until the scholarships are filled.

The Irish Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris has today announced funding from Science Foundation Ireland for UCD’s Natural Computing Research & Applications Group led by Prof Michael O’Neill and Prof Fergal McCaffery (Director Regulated Software Research Centre (RSRC) in Dundalk Institute of Technology) for the Reg-Fr-AIMs project, which sets out to develop a Regulatory Compliance Framework for Trustworthy AI Medical Device Software. Alongside Prof O’Neill, the UCD team of researchers include Dr Miguel Nicolau and Dr Annunziata Esposito Amideo. The funding, awarded under SFI’s Frontiers for Partnerships Awards, is worth €1.29 Million, and will see the recruitment of a team of 2 postdoctoral researchers and 6 PhD students.

As part of the collaborative research with Bell Labs that led to our HUMIES Gold Medal award , we have been granted a patent for Methods and systems for network self-optimization using deep learning.

Dr Dipak Sharma joins the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group as a Research Scientist on the DTIF GUARD project. Dr Sharma joins us from ACSL Ltd in Tokyo, Japan where he was employed as R&D Engineer – AI Lead.

We are delighted to Welcome a new Faculty member, Dr Mark Connor, to the UCD Natural Computing Research and Applications Group, and to the Management Information Systems Subject Area in the UCD College of Business. Mark joins us from his previous post as Lecturer in Sport Performance Analysis at the University of Suffolk. Prior to this Mark’s roles include Senior Data Scientist with EY, and Research & Innovation Lead with STATSports.

Our paper “Adaptive Athlete Training Plan Generation: An Optimal Control Systems Approach” has been published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, Volume 25 Issue 4.

A collaboration between the UCD Natural Computing Research and Applications Group and STATSports has resulted in a journal publication introducing a novel method for mathematically optimising team sport training models using evolutionary computation.

Connor M., Fagan D., Watters B., McCaffery F., O’Neill M. (2021). Optimizing Team Sport Training With Multi-Objective Evolutionary Computation. International Journal of Computer Science in Sport, 20(1):92-105

Congratulations to Prof Michael O’Neill who was awarded the Lero Director’s Prize for Research Excellence 2021. The annual awards recognise the enormous commitment and contribution of Lero members to the research centre’s success.

10 years on from hosting GECCO 2011 in Dublin, Ireland, Mark Connor and Michael O’Neill presented an approach to optimising the Banister Dose-Response Fitness-Fatique model used in athlete training management (arxiv draft) at GECCO 2021…

Do you use the Banister Dose-Response/ Fitness-Fatigue Model? Well, chances are you might have been using it wrong all this time… we’ve just published some new research, so let’s talk ‘Parameters’ pic.twitter.com/AlNhk9Xbc5

— Mark Connor (@MarkConradCon) July 12, 2021

Michael presented an invited talk on “Grammars, Evolutionary Computation and Intepretability” in a special session on Grammatical Evolution at DSSV-ECDA 2021 (7-9 July, 2021). The session was organised by Andreas Geyer-Schulz who spoke on “Architectural Design of a Unified GA/GP Package for R”, and Franz Rothlauf gave a talk on “Program Synthesis with Grammatical Evolution”.