Introduction

The Faculty of Engineering and Computing is comprised of the School of Electronic Engineering, the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and the School of Computing. There are also a number of interdisciplinary research institutes & centres within the Schools.

 

Current Researchers in the Faculty: Click here for Research Resources

 

Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE)

The Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) is the national centre for excellence in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) based in the School of Electronic Engineering at DCU. The Institute’s research programme is based on a set of four themes (high-speed networking, mobility of users and applications, the user interface and electronic content) that are collaboratively addressed by its constituent research groups. These themes overlap to a large extent: e.g. high-speed networking is evolving to the point where many electronic devices are mobile and are using wireless radio links.

The Institute currently has over 20 academic staff collaborating on a wide variety of research projects, which has led to over 150 scientific papers published and/or presented over the last three years. The Institute occupies a recently constructed, state of the art building, containing all the laboratories and facilities required to carry out leading edge research projects. It also has accommodation and facilities for up to 10 visiting researchers. A number of new research priorities are being explored in RINCE. Themes which have already been listed for future exploration include: wireless communications, ubiquitous computing, nano-engineered materials, photonics systems, and biomedical imaging. Visit www.rince.ie for additional details.

The objectives of the Institute are to be:

• the first point-of-contact for ICT research in Ireland;
• at a competitive advantage in terms of soliciting a significant proportion of funding and research opportunities in line with its standing as a National Centre for Excellence;
• the leading performer in at least one of DCU’s Strategic Themes, with a particular emphasis on Communication; Arts and Culture; Science, Discovery and Technological Innovation; and Life Sciences and Health in Society.

Centre for Digital Video Processing

The Centre for Digital Video Processing is a cross-disciplinary research centre based at DCU. Comprising 35 researchers, its work covers the automatic analysis of video and audio on a large scale in order to allow content-based operations such as browsing, searching, alerting, filtering, and summarisation, dealing with video archives of the order of hundreds of thousands of hours of content. The Centre tests its research work in the field where possible and applications developed to evaluate its research include Físchlár-TV and Físchlár-News. Físchlár- TV allows digital recording of broadcast TV programmes, which are then analysed to support browsing, search and playback. Físchlár-News records, analyses and structures broadcast TV news and also supports browsing, search, linking and playback of news stories. Both systems have been deployed on the DCU campus with hundreds of regular users and thousands of hours of content, since 2002.

At present, the Centre’s research is particularly challenged by the aim of supporting object-based navigation of video archives, allowing users to navigate video archives based on selection of objects present in the video. In addition to the above, the Centre also researches and develops systems for automatic summarisation of field sports such as soccer and Gaelic football. This involves audio and video analysis for the purpose of reducing, for example, an 80-minute rugby match down to 10 minutes of highlights, automatically. The Centre is also active in MPEG-4 hardware design to support MPEG-4 video processing, and in video access from mobile platforms. The Centre’s work is funded by the Enterprise Ireland Informatics Research Initiative, Science Foundation Ireland, EU FP6 (aceMedia), DCU, RINCE, and by industry. A campus company, Aliope Ltd, has been established and the Centre is working on commercialisation opportunities for some of its more recent work (www.cdvp.dcu.ie).

 

Materials Processing Research Centre (MPRC)

The MPRC was founded in 1990 and is comprised of members of staff from the School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering and Enterprise Ireland. It is a formally designated research centre of DCU, which means that it has been favourably evaluated in terms of its management, planning, research activity and quality. The centre offers fundamental, strategic and applied research of the highest quality in the areas of material science and material processing techniques. Over the last ten years there has been significant investment in this area, and MPRC members and students have access to high quality processing and characterisation equipment. Part of MPRC research activity, where the value of collaborative research and pooling of resources was recognised, constitutes a node of the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology (NCPST). MPRC members have interests in a broad area of materials based research including:

• Surface engineering
• Thin film coating
• Casting and semi-solid processing
• Powder based processing
• Ceramic based processing
• Rapid prototyping
• Material mechanical performance and evaluation
• Polymers and biomedical devices
• Machining and forming processes

For additional details visit www.mecheng.dcu.ie/MPRC/introduction.htm or contact:
Dr Lisa Looney, Director, Materials Processing Research Centre
Tel: +353 (0)1 700 5403
email: lisa.looney@dcu.ie

 

National Centre for Language Technology

The National Centre for Language Technology conducts research into the processing of human language by computers, such as speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, human-computer interfaces, information retrieval and extraction, the teaching and learning of languages using computers and software localisation and globalisation. Research in Human Language Technology (HLT) is interdisciplinary and includes Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL). HLT has substantial economic implications and potential. The Centre carries out basic research and develops applications.

For further details, visit: www.computing.dcu.ie/research/language.html