CRT-AI - Key Persons
Alberto has always been fascinated by the potential of artificial intelligence and its capacity to amaze. He oriented his academic path to focus on AI more specifically on machine learning.
He began his studies in Milan (IT) at the University of Milano Bicocca where he accomplished a bachelor's degree in computer science with a thesis named Rule based vehicle pedestrian interaction: focusing on pedestrians. He proceeded his education with a master's degree held by the same institute where he achieved H1.
Throughout it, he expanded his horizon by doing an intern as R&D for three months in a local company and by pursuing two Erasmus. First one to study one semester at the University of Tromsø. The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and second, with a length of 6 months, for researching on his master thesis aimed for new mobility services, at the Distributed System Group at the Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, entitled Shared Autonomous Vehicles: A Reinforcement Learning Approach.
Alberto is currently investigating Reinforcement Learning in multi agent context.
Colm Brandon is a first-year PhD student in the University of Limerick, where he is supervised by Prof. Tiziana Margaria and Dr. Kerry Hagan. His research is in the field of Recommendation Algorithms which is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that is concerned with tools and techniques to deliver tailored content and information to users. Colm holds an MSc. In Artificial Intelligence from the National University of Ireland, Galway where his thesis was focused on using network analysis in conjunction with machine learning to classify misinformation on Twitter. Away from academia Colm also is co-owner of a music events company and in the spare time enjoys playing rugby and listening to his record collection.
Dr. Derek Bridge has nearly two decades' of experience in the fields of recommender systems, personalisation, and machine learning. He is one of the founders of the ACM Conference in Recommender Systems and co-chaired it in 2008. His research covers many topics within recommender systems, most notably case-based recommenders, conversational recommenders, group recommendations, diversity and serendipity, and explanations.
Job Titles:
- Supervisor
- CRT in AI Supervisor / See Profile
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Co - Director
Ivana Dusparic is an Ussher Assistant Professor in Future Cities and the Internet of Things in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, a post she took up in 2016. She has obtained a BSc from La Roche College, Pittsburgh, USA in 2001, and an MSc and PhD from TCD in 2005 and 2010, respectively.
Her research expertise is the development of new artificial intelligence algorithms, and specifically reinforcement learning, for optimization of large-scale infrastructures. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the areas of reinforcement learning agents, multi-agent systems, intelligent mobility, and future communication networks.
Her research has been funded through a number of SFI and IRC initiatives, as well as by the industry partners. She is currently TCD lead of the SFI Centre for Research Training in AI, Principal Investigator of the Smart Networking in the Era of AI collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and Tsinghua University, and a Funded Investigator at Enable/CONNECT Research Centre.
She is active both nationally and internationally on promoting AI-enabled sustainability. She is a member of the management committee of the European COST network on Wider Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles, a member of the Royal Irish Academy's Computer Science and Engineering Committee, and a member of the steering committee of Future Cities: The Trinity Center for Smart and Sustainable Cities.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Supervisor
Dr. Patrick Healy is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department.
Following completion of his Ph.D. in computer science (University of Massachusetts) he joined the Research and Development Department of United Airlines and developed algorithmic advisory systems for handling irregular operations there.
His interests are combinatorial optimization, operations research, design of algorithms, and algorithms for automated graph drawing. He has numerous publications in international journals in these areas. He has consulted for some of the largest research grant funding bodies in Europe providing algorithms and systems to streamline processes in resource allocation and scheduling.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Co - Director
Dr. Suzanne Little (Co-Director, DCU). Dr. Little is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University and an SFI Funded Investigator in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Her research interests are in the area of multimedia semantics and she uses tools from artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and information retrieval to improve methods for content-based media analytics.
Fatemeh is a Ph.D. researcher in computer science and information systems at the University of Limerick. Her research interests lie in the area of Deep Generative model and mathematical programming, ranging from theory to design to implementation. Her current research concerns the analysis and introduction of an effective evaluation metric for deep generative models with a special attention to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models.
I am Filipe Souza, and I previously worked for seven years in an insurance company in Brazil dealing with large and complex datasets. In the last year, I graduated from a full-time MSc in AI with a successful first honours degree and the overall grade of 86.4%. During the masters, I worked on a novel hybrid algorithm that combined a dedicated genetic algorithm with a local search for solution refinement to solve 2D-BBP. After delivering my thesis, I also wrote a paper about this work and presented it in the 28th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Now I am starting my PhD journey researching about constraint programming with a focus on smart grids optimisation. I am also really interested in game theory and investigating the potential of combining.
Jasmina is a second-year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, where she is supervised by Professor Ivana Dusparic. Her research is mainly in the field of reinforcement learning, which is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence, concerned with developing smart autonomous agents.
She is in particular interested in researching methods for explaining behavior of agents. Prior to joining CRT-AI program, Jasmina obtained MSc. degree in computer science at University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Her MSc. thesis was focused on increasing robustness of neural networks for classifying damaged images. In her free time Jasmina is a passionate chess player.
Marco graduated from the University of Bologna with a Bachelor's degree in Physics in 2014, and with a Master's Degree in Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics in 2018. After high school graduation, he worked a two weeks internship at CERN, Geneva. Under the supervision of Dr Carla Sbarra, Marco learned to analyse calibration data of LHC detectors. During his Master's Degree, he won an INFN-MAE scholarship to study CMOS pixel detectors at the ATLAS Pixel Laboratory at CERN.
There, in a group supervised by Dr Heinz Pernegger, Marco measured and reconstructed the trajectories of particles hitting a silicon detector. During his master thesis, which took place also at CERN, he further studied the problem of track reconstruction inside a pixel detector, optimising the code of the currently used software. The work of his thesis featured in four scientific publications. After getting his Master's Degree, he began to study Machine and Deep Learning techniques, to apply them to the work of his master thesis.
In January 2019, he won a scholarship from the Department of Informatics, Science, and Engineering of the University of Bologna to study this particular problem. Besides studying the application of deep learning techniques to particle physics, he also worked on large-scale automated identification of cells in confocal light-sheet microscopy images by using Deep Learning and convolutional neural networks.
Currently, Marco is working on Machine Learning techniques applied to electronic quantum matter imaging experiments.
Martha Shaka is pursuing her PhD in computer science at the University College Cork, supervised by Professor Ken Brown and Professor Barry O'Sullivan. Her research interests focus on developing novel data analytics and deep learning techniques, especially for applications in health science, multi-agent interaction and resource optimisation in intelligent systems. She received an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Leeds in 2021. Her thesis leveraged deep learning techniques to capture essential differences and classify C.elegans mutant strains based on their behaviours to understand behaviour dynamics in relation to the nervous system.
Martha is one of the co-founders of capital space Ltd, aiming to enhance innovation and entrepreneurship through skills development and technology in Tanzania. In addition, She is an assistant lecturer at the University of Dodoma (UDOM) and occasionally volunteers to teach programming languages to girls in public high schools and organise local and national events inclined to share AI knowledge, such as Annual IndabaX Conferences and UDOM AI Community. Ms Martha enjoys reading and is a massive fan of football.
Job Titles:
- Professor in Data Analytics
Professor Paul Buitelaar is Professor in Data Analytics and Vice-Director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Galway where he also leads a team in Natural Language Processing.
He is co-Director of the SFI Centre for Research Training in AI and co-PI of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics. His research interests are in the development and use of Natural Language Processing methods for knowledge extraction and semantic-based information access. He has been involved in a large number of national and international funded projects in this area, among which the EU funded projects: Monnet, which developed the lemon model for ontology based lexicons; MixedEmotions, which developed the MixedEmotions toolbox for multilingual, multimodal emotion analysis; and Pret-a-LLOD, which develops the LingHub repository for linguistic data, among other focus areas. He has further been the originator and lead on the development of the Saffron framework for knowledge extraction from text.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Software Systems at the University of Limerick
- Professor
Prof. Margaria is Chair of Software Systems at the University of Limerick (Ireland), where she is currently Head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems. Her career funding totals over 80 million, over 18m of which to the own institution. Her broad research experience in the development and use of formal methods for high assurance systems, in particular concerning functional verification, reliability, and compliance of complex heterogeneous systems.
Enda O'Shea is currently a PhD student in the Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) program. He did his undergraduate in Computer Systems at the University of Limerick, graduating in 2017 with First-Class Honours. He has master's degrees, with Distinction and Merit respectively, in Rigorous Software Development (NUIM, 2018) and Knowledge Based Systems (University of St Andrews, 2019), in addition to a Level 7 degree in Business and Finance (L.I.T, 2006.) He has worked on projects in areas relating to Head Pose Estimation, Natural Language Processing, and Formal Verification.
His current PhD research, under the supervision of Professor Tiziana Margaria and Dr. Ciara Breathnach as project leader, is an interdisciplinary project between the Digital Humanities and Computer Science departments in the University of Limerick. Death and Burial Data for Ireland (DBDIrl) have been supplied by the General Registrar's Office (GRO) in Dublin for the period 1864-1922 to allow researchers to determine the causality of deaths, particularly related to young women, allowing for a potential greater understanding of the power dynamics in everyday life throughout this period. His research is the development of a Machine Transcription Pipeline for these handwritten historical records, covering technical areas such as image processing, segmentation, NLP, and data structures.
He has also worked for approx. 8 years in industry across various roles from Payroll, Access Security, and I.T Base Business. His interests outside of work include Hurling, Rugby, Soccer and Chess.
Hello everyone, I am a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Barry O'Sullivan and am currently working on Ethics in AI. My interests include Counterfactual explanations in AI, NLP, configuration systems, constraint programming, recommender systems etc. Some of my published work includes
Victor Coscrato is a Master in statistics by UFSCar/USP and Bachelor in Statistics byUFSCar. He was born in São Paulo. During his BSc he conducted his first scientific research on agnostic statistical inference. During this time, he was a volunteer member in both the tutorial education program in statistics (PET-EST/UFSCar) and the Risk study centre (CER/UFSCar). His BSc graduation work consisted of a comparative study between word2vec and bag-of-words on natural language processing classification applications. In the last period of his BSc, Victor worked as an intern in people analytics for Stone Company in São Paulo. His job was to create automatic mechanisms to accelerate and improve quality of the company's employee hiring process. During his MSc jorney Victor discovered his passion in machine learning, which became his main research field since then, leading him to join the statistical machine learning lab (SMaLL/UFSCar). During this time, he wrote two method proposal papers on neural networks usage on regression problems: the first method consisting in a neural network regression ensemble and the latter in a novel interface to local linear smoothing. The MSc dissertation was composed by these two papers combined in a fashion to expose how they connect to each other though. Currently, Victor is interested in general machine learning and artificial intelligence problems, more specifically, he is interested in recommender systems and machine learning models interpretations / prediction explanations. Nevertheless, non-parametric and agnostic statistical inference are still attractive fields for him.