News

 Professor Dermot Diamond, Dr Fernando Benito-Lopez and Dr Robert Byrne submitted two invention disclosures in 2008 and received a prize of €200 per disclosure at the recent Invent Invention Disclosure Awards. These awards were set up by the Invent Centre in DCU to recognise the researchers who work with the centre to protect and commercialise their research. Pictured left are Dr Benito-Lopez and Dr Byrne with their prizes at the Awards ceremony which occurred in December 2008.

Simon Dobson, a CLARITY researcher based in UCD has been appointed as one of the three Vice Presidents of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). ERCIM links the major ICT research labs across the EU providing a single voice to influence EU research policy. ERCIM also acts as a broker for proposal consortia and provides project management for successful proposals. By running a number of working groups, ERCIM assists in the co-ordination of research across Europe.

For more information about ERCIM, go to www.ercim.org

The CLARITY team has just signed a contract with the European Space Agency, through the Advanced Concepts Team at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, to carry out a 6-month study into how human perception of images and our ability to determine what is novel, interesting or curious, can be sensed automatically.  The study is entitled "Curiosity Cloning – Neural Modelling for Image Analysis" and will examine how our brainwaves can be used to indicate when an image we see looks interesting.

The work is part of a long-term project the ESA are running on developing intelligent software to run the Mars lander missions. 

Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, when an ESA mission lands on the Martian surface it must make all decisions autonomously, without direct control from Earth. Choosing a landing site is based on many factors including topology, slope, and scientific curiosity. But what is this scientific curiosity, what makes one image of the Martian surface more interesting than another, can we detect such curiosity and then can we program it into a Martian lander.  This study that CLARITY are running with the ESA will investigate if we can automatically sense and detect what makes one image more curious than another and is part of the research area known as brain computer interfaces.  If the study is successful then follow-on work could lead to the development of software to control Mars landings, which will really take CLARITY's impact out of this world !

The work will be led by Prof Alan Smeaton and will involve CLARITY researchers Peter Wilkins, Graham Healy and Aiden Doherty.

CLARITY researchers, members of the Wireless Sensors Team (WSN) from the Tyndall National Institute, hosted a fun, interactive demo at Discovery 2008 in November. The idea of their stand was to stimulate interest in electronic systems in general with a particular focus on the research topics being investigated within the team. This year, children were introduced to the idea of motion sensors and what you can do with them using the small form factor Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit (WIMU), a DJ’s turntable and some MP3’s in a fun little demo called DJ Junior -an interactive demo requiring the children to "become" the turntable and use their motion to trigger audio events. Feedback about the demo from families, teachers and children who attended the event was very positive.

Discovery, Cork’s Interactive Science Exhibition, has been running in Cork City Hall for the past number of years. Each year the 4-day exhibition attracts over 4000 people affording researchers an opportunity to communicate and showcase their work. This year it ran from Nov 16th- Nov 19th. For more information go to http://www.corkcorp.ie/discovery/discoveryexhibition2008/

 Pictured left is Tyndall researcher Brendan O'Flynn in the process of explaining about motes to children. 

Dr. Robert Byrne, a CLARITY post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Dermot Diamond’s Adaptive Sensors Group, pictured left, has been awarded a Short Term Travel Fellowship (STTF) from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The STTF supplement is designed to enable team members in an SFI funded group to collaborate on research projects in laboratories outside the Republic of Ireland. This award in conjunction with Prof. David Officer, will allow Robert to travel to the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Australia. Robert plans to spend two months working with Prof. Officer’s research team on the synthesis and characterization of photochromic polythiophenes. Photochromic switches are an intriguing class of organic molecules which allow the control of molecular structure and function with light. This offers the possibility of effecting dramatic changes to the bulk properties of a system by photonic irradiation. It is hoped that this research visit will help to strengthen research collaboration between the two groups.

Dr. Antonio Ruzzelli, a postdoctoral researcher at CLARITY, was invited to deliver  a seminar at senZations'08, a summer school on Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and Wireless Sensing in the Future Internet.

The seminar featured important programming challenges of wireless sensor networking and how some of these challenges can be overcome through intelligent tools, namely Octopus, that provides a visibility of the network behaviour and  helps developers and users in interacting with a remote sensor network.

The goal of this summer school was to:
•    survey the most relevant research domains
•    present various perspectives and underlying technologies
•    identify the most important challenges and research themes, in particular in relation to the role of WS&AN in the Future Internet
•    interact with distinguished scholars and establish contacts that may lead to research collaborations in the future
The intended audience consisted of about 40 post-graduate students, PhD students, and young researchers from universities and industrial laboratories around the world.

The summer school was held in the beautiful city of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

Lecturers included 

Dr. Zach Shelby (Sensinode Ltd.): IP based WSNs

Dr. Martin Ouwerkerk (Philips Research): Unobtrusive sensing of emotions in daily life

Dr. Antoine Fraboulet (INSA Lyon): WSN HW design and experiences from building a test bed

Dr. Stephan Haller (SAP Research): Internet of Things and Sensor Networks in Enterprise Environment

Dr. Ivan Stojmenovic (University of Birmingham): Routing in WSN

Dr. David Simplot-Ryl (INRIA): RFID Tutorial

Dr. Antonio Ruzzelli (CLARITY Centre): Programming WSN

Dr. Konrad Wrona (NATO C3 agency): Security in WSN

Dr. Srdjan Krco (Ericsson Ireland Research Centre): Wireless sensing in the Future Internet.

Two CLARITY researchers, Ciarán Ó Conaire and Edel O'Connor (pictured left), recently travelled to the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2008) in Raleigh, NC, USA. This conference provides an ideal venue for researchers to come together to address the research challenges facing the design, deployment, use, and limits of novel sensing systems. At the conference, Edel presented her work on integrating multiple sensor modalities for environmental monitoring of marine locations. This work is being carried out as part of a Beaufort Marine Research Award with the support of the Marine Institute, under the Sea Change strategy and the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, funded under the National Development Plan (2007-2013), in which CLARITY is a partner. Ciarán presented his work at the Workshop on Applications, Systems, and Algorithms for Image Sensing (ImageSense 2008), and presented recent CLARITY results on user localization using a combination of visual sensing and RF signal strength.

Todays Irish Times "Innovation" supplement (01/12/08) features CLARITY research, including interviews with Professor Noel O'Connor and Professor Alan Smeaton. Check it out at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/innovation/2008/1201/1227828881434.html

CLARITY researchers Michael Collins, Simon Dobson and Paddy Nixon have won best paper awards at two international conferences in the past few months. At the 3^rd International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST 2008) held in Dublin in June, the paper “Identifying and Isolating Aberrant Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks” won the best paper award. At the 2^nd International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing Systems (UBICOMM 2008) held in Valencia, Spain, at the end of September, the paper “A Secure Lightweight Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks” also won the best paper award.

CLARITY researcher Dr Michael O’Grady (pictured left) has recently been elevated to senior membership of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE). A non-profit organization, the IEEE is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. Michael is the Irish Coordinator for the local Chapter of the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics society. In this role, he organised the 6^th conference on Cybernetic Systems which was hosted in University College Dublin in September 2007. For more information regarding IEEE contact michael.j.ogrady@ucd.ie.