News

A new part-time Professional Diploma in Artificial Intelligence & Business Analytics is accepting applications to commence at the end of April 2024, and features faculty from the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications group. This is a fully accredited (NFQ Level 9 / 30 ECTS) PDip with six modules. Each module runs over two days on site in the Smurfit School, with modules running in April, June, Sep, Oct, Nov, and Jan.

Targeted at business executives, the diploma will provide participants with the knowledge, tools, and insights to demystify AI and business analytics and explore their application in their organisation. Real-world examples will be presented to demonstrate the capabilities, limitations, and opportunities provided by these technologies. Participants will discover how to leverage these to create a competitive edge for their business.

Prof’s O’Neill & Brabazon have published a chapter on Evolutionary Machine Learning in Finance (Chapter 24) as part of the new Handbook of Evolutionary Machine Learning edited by Wolfgang Banzhaf, Penousal Machado, Mengjie Zhang

Dr Mark Connor was interviewed on the future of AI for Authority Magazine

Congratulations to Dr Mark Connor and Dr Nam Le Hai who graduated with PhD’s from University College Dublin and the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group on 5 September 2023. Dr Mark Connor’s PhD thesis title is Optimisation and Adaptation of Athlete Training Load with Evolutionary Computation. Dr Nam Le Hai’s thesis is The Interplay between Evolution and Learning in Dynamic Environments: Computational Metaphor of Adaptive Algorithms

Following a recent podcast interview and conversations with colleagues outside of the field of Artificial Intelligence, Michael and Mark decided to collate a list of limitations of large language model technology, which some might find useful. These are captured in their new article Amplifying Limitations, Harms and Risks of Large Language Models published on arXiv

Congratulations to Dr Miguel Nicolau who is a Secondary Proposer for a newly awarded  COST Action (CA22137) “ROAR-NET – Randomised Optimisation Algorithms Research Network“

Congratulations to Bing Chen and supervisor Dr Miguel Nicolau on winning a UCD China Scholarship Council award to undertake a PhD on Explainable Artificial Intelligence.

Prof Michael O’Neill was interviewed by Emmet Oliver as part of the UCD Business Impact Podcast (Season 3, Episode 15), where some of the limitations of recent developments in AI, in particular large language models, are discussed.

As part of the Science Foundation Ireland funded Reg-Fr-AIMs project we are seeking applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher Fellowship 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, Dr Miguel Nicolau and Dr Mark Connor.

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.

The Post-doctoral Research Fellow will work with a team of PhD students and collaborating faculty in both UCD and DKiT, to assist in the adaptive representations research, and to investigate how we incorporate Ethical-by-design AI technology into medical device software systems.

Applications open until 27 April 2023, and further details for Job Ref :015809 at https://www.ucd.ie/workatucd/jobs/

Dr Shree Krishna Acharya joins the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group as a Research Scientist on the DTIF GUARD project. Dr Acharya joins us from Mokpo National University, South Korea.