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Former Insight researcher wins award for outstanding doctoral research

Former Insight researcher wins award for outstanding doctoral research

Former Insight researcher Dr Zhengwei Qiu has won a top award for his PhD thesis titled “A Lifelogging System Supporting Multimodal Access”. His work was chosen, by the editorial team of Journal of Documentation, as the winner of the 2014 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in the Information Science category.

Among the prizes included in this award are a €1,500 cash prize and the prospect of publication in the Journal of Documentation. 

Dr Qiu was part of the Lifelogging research team led by Dr Cathal Gurrin in Insight DCU. Lifeloggers use devices to record all aspects of their lives, from wearable cameras, to fitness trackers and other mobile devices. This generates an enormous amount of information and Dr Qiu’s research presented a lifelogging system which can automatically collect multi-sensor data, detect user context, segment life activities into events, generate meaningful narratives from this information and display the appropriate data on a range of different computing devices based on their unique characteristics. The work in his thesis is a valuable contribution to the development of the field of lifelogging and provides guidance to subsequent researchers on how to optimise user interaction with lifelog archives.

Dr Qiu said, “I am delighted to receive this prestigious award from Emerald. I would like to sincerely thank my PhD supervisor Dr Cathal Gurrin and mentor Professor Alan Smeaton for their great expertise in the lifelogging field. Their extremely strong support and very kind hearts enabled me to have a very memorable PhD journey at Dublin City University. I also thank all colleagues and friends at DCU who helped me along the journey. I am very grateful to the reviewers and organizers of this award. They have strengthened my belief in what I am doing. I will continue to improve my work and hopefully one day, more people will benefit from it.”