CNGL

I am a research fellow in the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL). The centre is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) in the category "Centre for Science Engineering and Technology (CSET).

Access to information and seamless communication are keys to success in the emerging multilingual and multicultural societies, and underpin global commerce and development. Localisation, the industrial process of linguistic and cultural adaptation to market requirements, is a core strategic technology in the transformation towards information- and knowledge-based economies. Ireland is particularly well placed to have a strong impact on this core strategic technology. Ireland has the highest concentration of localisation industry worldwide, and has continuously been at the forefront of innovation and development of localisation processes and practices. The CNGL has the potential to revolutionise localisation through its unique Industry-Academia partnership. We aim to achieve breakthroughs in standards, interoperability and automation based on language and digital content management technology. The basic research carried out at the CNGL underpins these breakthroughs and provides the foundations for technology transfer and commercial exploitation of the results. The Centre will help Ireland to maintain its leading position in this important sector of ICT, move localisation activities in Ireland up the value chain, and, in close collaboration with the Industrial Partners, ensure that innovations from the research labs translate into business opportunities, revenue streams and cutting edge, high-tech employment opportunities in the Irish ICT sector. In addition, through one of its Industrial Partners, DNP, the Centre has the unique opportunity to directly engage in the development and innovation of localisation technology in the Asian market.

1641 Depositions

The three-year 1641 Depositions project aims to transcribe and digitise the Depositions comprising 3,400 depositions, examinations and associated materials, located in the Library of Trinity College Dublin, in which Protestant men and women of all classes told of their experiences following the outbreak of the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in October, 1641. Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to approximately 19,000 pages, and constitutes the chief evidence for the sharply contested allegation that the rebellion began with a general massacre of protestant settlers.

The project will investigate innovative technology to structure and lend meaning to a large corpus of unstructured information. The objectives of this project are:

To investigate how text analytics and semantic mark-up tools can be used to enable researchers to discover new insights contained within the digital humanities.

To capture some aspects of the subtle processes by which researchers model the meaning of documents and to make key aspects of their knowledge available to other researchers.

To prototype and evaluate selected tools which achieve these objectives, using the transcribed 1641 Depositions as a corpus of unstructured humanities content.

Lecturing

I lecture a course on Information Retrieval and Web Search for Senior Freshmen ans Senior Sophister Computer Science students. The course reviews the current state of the art in IR and Web Search and explains the technologies implemented in the area. It also discusses future trends in the Internet and IR industries.

I have also delivered courses on Software Applications to Senior Sophister MEMS (Manufacturing Engineering and Management Science) students and Junior Sophister MSISS (Management Science and Information Systems Studies) students. The course involved the study of PHP and MySQL and their use on the Web.