Student-led (web-)app user-centred design projects

I have supervised many projects involving the design and prototype development of apps and am happy to do more. Past examples include a mobile app to support development of patient self-efficacy, a mobile app to support suicide watch teams on the Corrib in Galway, a web application for supporting virtual work team productivity, and a … Read more

Patient-generated health data

Increasingly, patients gather data relevant to their healthcare on their phones and via wearable or home-based sensors. When this data is intended for healthcare professionals it is known as patient generated health data (PGHD). But getting that data into a form that can be shared seamlessly with the healthcare system is a challenge. And clinicians … Read more

MCTS-Guided Decoding for a Small Reasoning Neural Net Model

The raw output of  a language neural net model is a set of probabilities over the possible next word (or token).  That is then converted into text output by a decoding step.  Standard decoding — greedy, beam search, or independent sampling — commits to each token or reasoning step without any lookahead about whether it’s … Read more

Differentially-Private Fine-Tuning of a Small Language Neural Net Model

Fine-tuning language models on sensitive text (medical notes, private messages, internal documents) risks the model memorizing and later regurgitating specifics from the training data — a well-documented failure mode for even small models. Differential privacy (DP), via DP-SGD, gives a formal, quantifiable guarantee against this by clipping per-example gradients and adding calibrated noise during training. … Read more

Learning To Classify Mobile App Behaviour from Encrypted Network Traffic Metadata

Modern app traffic is almost universally encrypted (TLS/QUIC), so the payload itself reveals nothing to a passive observer. But metadata — packet sizes, timing, direction, burst structure — survives encryption untouched, and this metadata may leak surprising amounts of information about what’s actually happening on the device. In this project you will build, train, and … Read more

[26/27] Project #7: Annotating transcribed historical documents with NER/GenAI

With tools such as Transkribus (https://www.transkribus.org/) and eScriptorium (https://www.sofer.info/), AI-based image processing techniques are unblocking what has been a hugely expensive and time-intensive process of turning historical documents into machine readable transcriptions, in a manner that enables a scaling up of the process.The next problem that then needs to be tackled is how to support … Read more

[26/27] Project #6: Timeline visualisation of people data

Using timelines to visualise critical data is particularly useful for domain experts to examine and analyse a wide range of data. For example for Historians a timeline visualisation such as seen in an early attempt of this (https://timelines.virtualtreasury.ie/timelines/) for the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland team is really helpful. This user interface was developed a … Read more

[26/27] Project #5: Using NLP/GenAI to support annotation of historical document transcriptions with Knowledge Graph entities

This project focuses on how to deploy Natural Language Processing and Generative AI approaches to support historians to annotate transcriptions with links to entities in an existing knowledge graph. Typically this means employing techniques to undertake Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking tasks and providing candidate annotations to the historians through a simple user interface … Read more