Research Focus
The focus of this research centre is to undertake frontier and applied research across a range of application domains where users interact with or are serviced by ICT technologies in an intelligent, context aware and personalised manner. Through measuring Quality of Experience, we work to understand how key influencing factors affect human-technology interaction, we strive to ensure such systems have real world impacts for individuals, industry, and society.
As such, we work with a range of technologies such as:
- Extended Reality (augmented reality, virtual reality, social XR)
- Artificial Intelligence (Human-Centric) and Machine Learning
- Smart sensing and human behaviour analysis (Signal processing (speech processing, physiological signals, interaction analysis))
- Multisensory Multimedia experiences (which include Haptics and Olfaction)
Our research is motivated to have real world impacts, supporting the midlands region as an incubator of positively disruptive technologies. The result will be a collaborative transformational unit for researchers, national funding bodies and industry to address key societal challenges.
Research Vision
Excellence in research informs the development of digital media and technological solutions for the human stakeholder in domains where opportunities via digitisation and ICT are rapidly emerging. As such, we collaborate with sports scientists and health professionals (e.g. psychology, nursing, speech and language pathologists and occupational therapists) as well as those from education, tourism, manufacturing and creative and cultural sectors. A common requirement across these application domains is a human centred approach towards the design of systems and applications that serve users in different contexts. It brings together researchers from these areas and hence, our group is human centric and multidisciplinary at its core. It operates at the confluence of media, computing and the various above referenced application domains to drive the development of human-centred eX-systems which will have real world and regional impacts.
Our Team
Our team comprises 16 MSc/PhD candidates, 3 postdoctoral researchers, project manager, research engineer and 5 permanent faculty members from the department of computer & software engineering in TUS. The department members include Dr. Conor Keighrey, Dr. Thiago Braga, Dr. Ronan Flynn, Dr. Mark Daly, and Dr. Niall Murray.
Projects
We have a range of ongoing projects.
- Horizon Europe TRANSMIXR project – see here – please sign up to our newsletter to hear the latest stories on this project. In this project we are working with 22 partners from across Europe to support the creative and culture sections with innovations in Social XR and Human centric AI.
- SFI Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing – we have ongoing projects with several national and international industry partners working on understanding the utility that XR technologies bring to human robotic interaction and other manufacturing use cases.
- SFI Adapt Centre for AI enabled digital content – we have projects as part of Adapt that are considering how human centred AI systems can support personalised XR experiences within health and education contexts.
- Irish Research Council – via support from the IRC postgraduate scholarships program several PhD students working on XR, QoE, Human centric AI and intelligent sensing across a range of application domains.
- Enterprise Ireland – working with the COMAND technology gateway based in the Software Research Institute TUS:Athlone campus, we have ongoing industry engagements where we support companies to test before they invest with XR technologies.
- In addition to above, we would also like to acknowledge the university for supporting our research program via the President’s Doctoral Scholarship program.