Professor Declan O'Sullivan

Summary

The ADAPT Centre will address the grand challenge in Digital Platform Content and Applications: how can enterprises, institutionsband individuals easily assimilate, reuse and interact with the global torrent of digital content? Transitioning from the Centre for Global Intelligent Content(CNGL), ADAPT will build upon demonstrated, world-recognised research and significant commercial impacts of the multidisciplinary applicant group to develop breakthroughs in Global Digital Content technology, which will turn this heterogeneous torrent of content into meaningful global conversations between organisations and users. This will be achieved by making unprecedented advances in the areas of multilingual natural language processing (NLP), multimedia content analysis and transformation, personalisation and multimodal delivery. The ADAPT Centre's research programme will enable: deeper understanding of multilingual content through multilingual NLP; dynamic transformation of multimedia content to break down language and cultural barriers; personalisation of the user experience to ensure rapid assimilation and reuse of content; and multimodal/multimedia interaction with global content for natural user engagement.

Funding Agency

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)

Programme

Research Centre

Summary

ALIGNED will develop new ways to build and maintain IT systems that use big data on the web. ALIGNED brings together world class computer science researchers (TCD, Oxford, Leipzig), software companies specialised in data-intensive systems (Sematic Web Company), information companies (Wolters Kluwer Germany) and academic curators of large datasets describing world history and archaeology (Oxford, Poznan). Together they will create more efficient methods of building IT systems that extract, process, publish and share web data. This will lay the foundations for the next generation of big data systems that lower costs and deal with the web data challenges of dynamism, complexity, scale and inconsistency.

Funding Agency

European Union

Programme

H2020

Summary

In an attempt to reduce the energy efficiency gap and provide customers with energy consumption information, the EU mandated that all electrical appliances carry labels to indicate their energy consumption. These labels consist of colourcoded efficiency bands and annual kWh estimates. However, it is hypothesised that consumers do not understand or correctly interpret the information provided in these labels, in particular in relation to how much the appliance will cost to operate. This project proposes that if consumers were provided with information on the operating costs of electrical appliances that this information would nudge them towards more efficient purchases. This project will thus conduct an experimental retail trial to investigate firstly if displaying monetary cost information on a range of electrical appliances would encourage consumers towards the purchase of more efficient appliances. Recent economics literature using stated preference techniques indicates that consumers are more likely to respond to monetary usage information if it more accurately reflects their own usage patterns (rather than average prices and consumption). However, this hypothesis is almost impossible to test in a meaningful way in a retail setting without the involvement of smart technology. Thus, the second component of this project brings together the disciplines of behavioural economics and information systems in a novel way to conduct a field experiment to investigate if providing this personalised information would encourage people towards more efficient purchases. The proposed research is problem focused and addresses issues of social, technical and policy relevance. In particular, it involves transferring information from behavioural economics and information technology laboratories into the real world through the use of a field experiment. It will contribute significantly to the literature on behavioural economics, particularly in the area of the 'energy efficiency gap', and to the information systems literature in the areas of personalisation and data visualisation.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

New Horizons' Research Project Grant, Strand Two Interdisciplinary (IDR)

Summary

Funding Agency

Science Foundation Ireland

Programme

Research Centre

Summary

Funding Agency

Science Foundation of Ireland

Programme

Strategic Research Cluster