NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
Not a member yet
18159 research outputs found
Sort by
Smart DCU Digital Twin: Advancing Towards an Immersive Environment
No full textThis is a groundbreaking collaboration that brings together Bentley Systems, Dublin City Council, Dublin City University, and the INSIGHT SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics with a goal of exploring and understanding the concept of Digital Twin Technology for better user experience. By leveraging their combined capabilities and expertise, the collaboration aims to push the boundaries of Digital Twins to new heights. The focus is on exploring the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Immersive Technologies to visualise complex environmental and contextual data in real time using advanced 3D visualisation techniques. This technology is experimented in a 3D cyberspace of Dublin City University, which is also one of the testbeds under the broader Smart Dublin umbrella. It is an ongoing project and expects to develop effective use-cases for monitoring present situations, multi-stakeholder collaboration and action research towards a responsive and adaptive campus environment. The methodology is mainly based on the Bentley ecosystem, which is used for the processing of the drone photography, creation of the digital models, streaming and storing of IoT sensor data, and publication of the Digital twin. Our work would like to demonstrate the use case of Smart DCU to the wider audience using immersive technology and interactive web-based platforms. For instance, people would be able to experience the whole campus environment with existing IoT data, 360 degree views etc as well as explore the interiors of some of the buildings for which BIM models are in place. For this, we will need a dedicated space with a large projector screen for people to experience part of our ongoing digital twin project using VR headsets. The idea is to showcase the current work to the general public and possibly receive some valuable feedback
Ireland’s cultural policy and the protection and promotion of the cultural rights of migrants
No full textThe protection and promotion of cultural rights within Irish law and
policy has been historically neglected and has only recently been
recognised as a policy objective in its own right with the
publication of “Culture 2025. Éire Ildánach”, Ireland’s first
dedicated cultural policy framework. This article seeks to critically
review this policy specifically as relates to the protection and the
promotion of the cultural rights of migrants in Ireland. Whilst
recognising that the Policy Framework represents a more holistic
approach to the protection of cultural rights in general, this
article will argue that it fails to provide any substantive
protection to the cultural rights of migrants in Ireland. The
protection of cultural rights appears to be more strongly iterated
in Ireland’s migrant integration policy, as implemented through
Government department initiatives and localised strategies,
however overall, Irish policy is lacking in terms of satisfactory
engagement with the cultural rights of migrant
A Restorative Response to the Abuse of Children Perpetrated by Joseph Marmion S.J.
No full textThis process began as a result of the efforts of Donal Ballance, a former pupil of the Jesuit-run Belvedere
College. He had been abused by priest and former teacher Fr Joseph Marmion SJ, now deceased, while
attending that school. For over two years, Donal had engaged with the Jesuit Order in Ireland, asking them
to publicly name Joseph Marmion for his abuse of children whilst under their care (see Appendix 1 pg. 100).
On 2 March 2021, the Jesuits made a public statement naming Joseph Marmion SJ as someone who had
abused boys sexually, emotionally, and physically during his time in Belvedere College. Subsequently, it
became known that he had also abused children while teaching in Clongowes Wood College, Kildare, and
Crescent College1 in Limerick. His time in those three schools spans from 1962 to 1978. His removal from
the staff of Belvedere College in 1978 followed disclosures of sexual abuse during a school trip to Vienna
in 1977.
The publication of the public statement by the Jesuits commenced a series of testimonies by past pupils in
the media in which they shared their experiences of abuse by Joseph Marmion more than four decades
ago. Within a fortnight of the statement and resulting media coverage, more than 40 past pupils who had
been harmed by Joseph Marmion came forward to the Jesuit Safeguarding Officer. As part of her
engagement with them, she asked two core questions: What happened? What do you think needs to
happen now
Communicating criminological research to the public – findings from the science communication literature. (Working Paper Series No – 18 May 2023)
No full textIt is necessary to communicate the findings of social research to educate the public,
challenge problematic beliefs and inform the political discourse (Uggen & Inderbitzen,
2010). In the field of criminology, this is essential given the highly political nature of
criminal justice policy and the fact that criminological findings on how to meet needs and
keep society safe are often complex, countercultural and counterintuitive to many. How
best to do so, however, presents challenges to academics of all disciplines.
Research on science communication is burgeoning, finding common pitfalls around the
framing of research communications, their visual and linguistic presentation, and the
pedagogical techniques commonly employed. When communicating with the public,
many educators rely on traditional lecturing methods, neglecting situated, discussionbased learning. Yet, the evidence suggests that traditional lecturing is not experienced as
engaging and does not sufficiently hold learners’ attention, rendering it ineffective. Rather,
research consistently shows the benefits of facilitating independent learning and
engaging learners dialogically to explore deeply held assumptions. Research pertaining
to framing, meanwhile, shows that challenging existing narratives and justifying reform in
relation to crime and justice requires careful consideration as to which findings and
arguments are prioritised, and what types of language, values and metaphors are used
Educational Experience, Pedagogical Research and the State’s Interest
No full textThis contribution makes the case that education has inherent purposes which distinguish it as a human practice; purposes that are distinct from those of the state . The philosophical and historical ancestry of these purposes is explored . This exploration reveals that educational experience is more properly understood as a live encounter with inheritances of learning than as a matter of transmission . The teaching of religion is taken as a concrete example to highlight this key difference . Where the state fails to recognise the inherent purposes of education, these purposes can become compromised . Accordingly, educational practice may fall victim to different kinds of domination . Some historical and more recent examples of such domination are identified and considered, as is an example of a healthy relationship between the state and educational practice . The consequences of the investigation for pedagogical research and practice, and for the proper relationship of the state to education, are then reviewed
Statistical and Machine Learning Models for Multivariate Sensor Data with Application to Environmental Monitoring
No full textThe increased availability and use of sensor data in environmental monitoring has led to
a vastly increased demand for tools that can process, analyze and report on important
environmental events in real or near-real time. These data have special characteristics,
being high dimensional, recorded in space and time, and with potential missing values
/ sparsity issues. This thesis concerns itself with the building of statistical and machine
learning methods for data of this type. Statistical methods can play an important role
in inferring valuable features of the latent data-generating processes of the sensor data,
while properly taking into account the uncertainty. Machine learning methods can play a
significant role by offering an automatic framework to unearth complex patterns underlying
the data, being scalable and dealing with challenges such as sparsity in an innovative
way.
This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how to monitor the environment,
focusing on Dublin Bay as a proof of concept. It examines sea-level rise, water turbidity,
and how to manage large environmental datasets that change over time and space with
missing values. Firstly, it updates us on Dublin’s sea level record to produce a processed
data product from 1938 to 2016. It utilizes a new statistical approach to make better
estimates of average sea levels and finds that sea levels have been rising more quickly in
recent times. Then it investigates how human activities, such as dredging and dumping,
affect water turbidity in Dublin Bay. It employs a new statistical model called VARICH to
model the variability in water turbidity over two years and at different locations, finding
that weather conditions like wind speed significantly impact most locations. Meanwhile,
dredging operations show lower impacts, and dumping operations have a significant impact
only at greater water depths. Lastly, the dissertation addresses the challenge of
missing values in large-scale environmental datasets by proposing two innovative models
for multivariate spatio-temporal forecasting that offer competitive performance without
the need for imputation. These models are a transformer-based model, SERT, and a
simpler, interpretable model, SST-ANN.
Altogether, the chapters of this dissertation provide new insights into environmental
trends and offer novel methods for analysing environmental data. This is all taking
place against the backdrop of significant global issues such as climate change, loss of
biodiversity, and increasing pollution. This thesis stands as an example of how data
analysis is advancing in the field of environmental monitoring
Business school students’ motivations and intentions to pursue a project management career
No full textProject management (PM) career choice is important as millions of new projects will need skilled and motivated project managers. Therefore, the younger generation must be motivated to acquire the necessary skills to deal with project complexities and dynamics. In previous research, the factors that impact students’ perceptions of their learning experiences and their readiness to PM work has been investigated without examining the factors that impact the choice of a PM career. In this study our aim is to describe the intentions and motivations of business school students to pursue a PM career. Our results demonstrate that motivations such as self-development, professional growth, status and power, and technical and human skills are significantly influential in PM career choices
Estimating Optimal Synchronization Parameters for Coherent Chaotic Communication Systems in Noisy Conditions
No full textIt is known, that coherent chaotic communication systems are more vulnerable to noise in the transmission channel than conventional communications. Among the methods of noise impact reduction, such as extended symbol length and various digital filtering algorithms, the optimization of the synchronization coefficient may appear as a very efficient and simple straightforward approach. However, finding the optimal coefficient for the synchronization of two chaotic oscillators is a challenging task due to the high sensitivity of chaos to any disturbances. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for finding the optimal synchronization parameter K_opt for a coherent chaos-based communication system affected by various noises with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). It is shown, that under certain conditions, optimal
K
provides the lowest possible bit error rate (BER) during the transmission. In addition, we show that various metrics applied to the message demodulation task propose different noise immunity to the overall system. For the experimental part of the study, we simulated and physically prototyped two chaotic communication systems based on well-known Rossler and Lorenz chaotic oscillators. The microcontroller-based prototype of a chaotic communication system was developed to investigate the influence of noise in the real transmission channel. The experimental results obtained using the designed hardware testbench are in good correspondence with the theoretical propositions of the study and simulation results. The suggested evaluation metrics and optimization algorithms can be used in the design of advanced chaos-based communication systems with increased performance
Sinful Social Structures and the Issues of Migration and Refugees: Reassessing Pope Francis’s Agenda on Migration/Refugee Crisis and the Response of the Church to the Challenges of Internally Displaced Persons in Nigeria.
No full textThe United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees testifies that an unprecedented 89.3
million people around the world have been forced from their homes by conflict and
persecution. Among them are 27.1 million refugees, 53.2 million Internally Displaced Persons
and 4.6 million asylum seekers. Over half of the world’s refugees are under the age of 18. 1
out of every 88 persons in the world has been forced to flee.1 Behind the cold numbers of
staggering statistics that characterise contemporary global phenomenon of migration, “lie
human faces struck by tragedies of immense proportions, with loss of land and homes, family
separation, physical sufferings, rape, sexual violence, psychological damage, lack of
opportunities for education, uncertain future, and death itself.”2
Migration is a perennial
concern for the church and theology and has been addressed in many ways but fundamentally,
through the church’s teaching on unconditional hospitality, and the human rights and dignity
of victims. The complex nature of modern migration calls for a greater attention to the
structures of society and the role they play in the migration and refugee crisis. Hence, this thesis
addresses the migration/refugee crisis through the lens of “sinful social structure.” This is
necessary because conflict and poverty, the two major causes of forced migration, both have
roots in local/international structures. A review of Pope’s Francis’ agenda on the migration
regime, and an X-ray of the situation of Internally Displaced Persons in Nigeria provide deep
content for the task of the Thesis
Understanding the neural baroreflex: Pulsatility, baroreflex sensitivity and system identification - experimentation and analysis
No full textBlood pressure is a dynamic measurement that continuously changes based on a
variety of physiological needs. Adequate blood pressure is crucial for a variety of
reasons, such as organ perfusion, oxygen circulation, and the excretion of harmful
toxins. Prolonged periods of blood pressure abnormalities, such as hypotension and
hypertension, can lead to an array of adverse events, including myocardial infarction
and stroke. Understanding blood pressure dynamics can aid the early diagnosis and
slow the development of adverse cardiovascular conditions. This thesis aims to provide
additional information about the neural baroreflex, the short term regulator of blood
pressure.
A protocol to characterise the neural baroreflex from data recorded, where the
baroreceptors remain intact, is presented. The method allows for both time- and
frequency- domain model identification that accurately represent the neural baroreflex.
Mayer waves, or low-frequency oscillations, are observed in blood pressure readings,
occurring at approximately 0.1Hz in humans. The origin and prognostic value of these
waves are currently being explored. In this thesis, a baroreflex model is extended
to include compliance and pulsatility. This model is then used to determine the
conditions under which low-frequency oscillations occur, with a focus on the effect of
blood pressure pulsatility on their presence. The analysis suggests that as pulsatility
decreases, the incidence of Mayer waves increases. This hypothesis is then examined
experimentally.
The functionality of the baroreflex is evaluated through baroreflex sensitivity estimation.
A decrease in baroreflex sensitivity has been proven to be a reliable indicator of adverse
cardiovascular events. The current gold standard is the Oxford method, an invasive
procedure that cannot be performed in routine clinical settings. Hence, there is a need
for a non-invasive alternative. This thesis examines the viability of sequence methods,
a popular non-invasive alternative, as a reliable estimation method.
This thesis explores a collection of studies which, individually, have their own unique
contributions. However, collectively the studies work to increase the understanding
of blood pressure regulation, providing insight to aid the development of baroreflex
assessment methods and potentially aid the identification of potential sources of
baroreflex dysregulation