Deirdre Dalton prototyped a pool trainer as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2009 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to analyse the game of pool with the view to implementing some simple instructions to help tutor or teach a player.

A camera and sensor were used to take in information from the pool table. The camera was mounted directly above the pool table to capture ball colour and position. A SHIMMER, (Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Reusability) developed by Intel, was strapped to the base of the cue. Each SHIMMER contains a MicroSD - card slot, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, a 3-Axis accelerometer (1.5 6G) and a 3-Axis gyroscope (500 o/s). The accelerometer was of particular interest to this project as it was designed to react to very small changes in movement. It relayed the movements of the cue and was used to identify the strength of each shot.

A shot appeared as a large spike in the accelerometer data. The magnitude of this spike was calculated, and a strong correlation between the distance the ball travelled following this shot and the acceleration was determined. After much experimenting, a general equation was extracted which can determine how far the ball will travel, the moment it is struck by the cue.

Using this results it is possible to identify if a player is striking the ball with enough force to travel a certain distance, e.g., to pot a ball or roll up to a cushion for a safety shot. The work presented here is a strong starting point for future experimentation and analysis with a view to fully instrumenting a pool hall and providing teaching aids to a player to improve his/her game.

Further Information

There are more images from ODCSSS 2009 on Flickr. If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Deirdre Dalton prototyped a pool trainer as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2009 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to analyse the game of pool with the view to implementing some simple instructions to help tutor or teach a player.

A camera and sensor were used to take in information from the pool table. The camera was mounted directly above the pool table to capture ball colour and position. A SHIMMER, (Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Reusability) developed by Intel, was strapped to the base of the cue. Each SHIMMER contains a MicroSD - card slot, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, a 3-Axis accelerometer (1.5 6G) and a 3-Axis gyroscope (500 o/s). The accelerometer was of particular interest to this project as it was designed to react to very small changes in movement. It relayed the movements of the cue and was used to identify the strength of each shot.

A shot appeared as a large spike in the accelerometer data. The magnitude of this spike was calculated, and a strong correlation between the distance the ball travelled following this shot and the acceleration was determined. After much experimenting, a general equation was extracted which can determine how far the ball will travel, the moment it is struck by the cue.

Using this results it is possible to identify if a player is striking the ball with enough force to travel a certain distance, e.g., to pot a ball or roll up to a cushion for a safety shot. The work presented here is a strong starting point for future experimentation and analysis with a view to fully instrumenting a pool hall and providing teaching aids to a player to improve his/her game.

Further Information
There are more images from ODCSSS 2009 on Flickr. If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Poornima Hanumara developed the Near Dear project as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2008 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The original project title was Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives - it called for an ambient/pervasive/ubiquitous technology for helping family members keep in touch with each other using micro-blogging tools (e.g., using Twitter or Jaiku). Originally we looked at using Nabaztags (thanks Matt), but eventually settled on using Chumbys.

The motivation for Near Dear was that members of a family have different degrees of familiarity and comfort with using technology. While some members of the family do not have access to a computer very often and are not familiar with micro-blogging, for others Internet is the main medium for keeping-in-touch. Near Dear bridges this gap by using Chumby, which sits in an accessible place at home and makes microblogging easy and convenient for computer-novices. We completed a small user study shows that the Near Dear widget is intuitive and serves the purpose of making Twittering more convenient. The Near Dear Chumby widget was released as a beta on the Chumby Network in July 2008 and is available to install on any Chumby. The project is documented on the Near Dear website. The project is being maintained and if anyone wants to collaborate on it going forward we'd love to hear from you :-)

In the News

Before leaving Texas, Pegasus News ran an article on Poornima's success at winning a place in ODCSSS 2008 and wished her luck. During the project, one of the Dublin newspapers, the Herald, wrote an article on Near Dear at an early stage of the project's development when we were playing with Nabaztags. The project was also mentioned in a DCU news release after the mid-term review day, and in science.ie, a popular Irish science website.

Further Information

Pictured below is Poornima being presented with a Hamilton silver coin, her prize for best report in 2008 (the award was presented by one of the heads of ODCSSS, Dr. Aaron Quigley). Poornima's final report was published as a UCD technical report and is available for download here. She still maintains a blog that contains detailed progress of her project. There are more images from ODCSSS 2008 on Flickr . If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Project Summary

The Whereabouts Clock was a final year project undertaken by Christine Trant and under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. This project attempts to display the locations of individuals in an unobtrusive display from sensed real-time location information. This deals with the issue of combining real-time data with unobtrusive displays; real-time data is concerned with privacy while adding real-time data to situated displays is still relatively new. The Whereabouts Clock originally implemented by Microsoft Research is a situated display to show the whereabouts of family or friends. The Whereabouts Clock is used to find the locations of people such as family members and display it in a way that is unobtrusive, similar to the way a clock displays the time. While Microsoft Research use cell towers to track mobile phones, this project used computers with machine IDs and visible wireless devices to track users. The result of this project has been the development of a novel implementation of a Whereabouts Clock to determine and display a user's location. To test the value of the Whereabouts Clock, a user study was carried out over a course of 5 days. The user study found that the Whereabouts Clock was well received and would be a useful application for friends and family.

Project Summary

The ReFInDer system was a final year project undertaken by Colin Smith under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to design and implement a memory aid using RFID technology. This memory aid takes the form a lost and found application. The system records data about user's interactions with everyday objects, such as a wallet or phone, and presents the user with this data through a lost and found website.

Over the last semester, the students of Comp30050 have been working on their collaborative software engineering projects. At the start of the module, students choose their own team mates and propose their own projects. They set milestones for themselves, which are used to grade their progress. On April 24th they ran demos of their completed systems for the department to see.

This page contains a summary of my research.

I am employed as a research fellow in Clique, the Graph and Network Analysis Cluster in CASL in University College Dublin in Ireland. I currently work with Dr. Martin Harrigan on the EgoNav project, funded by the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Programme.

I have a few web presences associated with my work/research, including:

• 
• Google Scholar
• 
• DBLP Profile
• Eventseer Profile
• Lero Profile Page (for a position I held as a postdoctoral researcher in Lero from April 2009 to August 2011)

Past Biography

Dr. Coyle's previous position was as a research fellow position in Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre in the University of Limerick (since March 2009). Prior to that he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computer Science and Informatics in University College Dublin between April 2005 and March 2009. He was conferred with his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2005. He also holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Trinity College (BA, BAI 2001). His research interests include Software Engineering, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, Context-Aware Systems, Machine Learning, Personalisation technologies, and Electronic Voting. Dr Coyle has published at a number of international journals and conferences including IEEE Computer, the Communications of the ACM, the Knowledge Engineering Review, the journal on Knowledge-Based Systems, the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), the ACM Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS), the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), the European Conference on Smart Sensing & Context (EuroSSC), Artificial Intelligence Review, and the International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA).

Dr Coyle served as general co-chair at the 20th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2009); served as volunteers chair at Pervasive 2006; and as Publications Co-Chair at Pervasive in 2007. He is a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence and serves or has served on a number of Internationally peer reviewed symposia and workshops in the area of context-awareness and ubiquitous computing, including the International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness, the International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems, the IEEE International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, the International IEEE Workshop on Management of Ubiquitous Communications and Services, the International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context, and the International Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation. He has also served as reviewer for The Knowledge Engineering Review, ACM TAAS, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, as well as many of the premier venues for Ubiquitous Computing, including Ubicomp, PerCom, Pervasive, CHI, IUI, and the Internet of Things conference.

Research Projects

• Citation Analysis: I did some work with Jill Freyne, Barry Smyth, and Pádraig Cunningham that compared the citation counts of computer science conference and journal publications. This lead to a technical report and an upcoming article the Communications of the ACM. A page showing a summary of the raw data generated by our scripts is here.
• Construct: I am one of the creators and developers of the Construct Pervasive Computing Infrastructure
• Lost and Found: Arts meets Science at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2007.
• Electronic Voting: I worked with the Commission on Electronic Voting and contributed to their first report, writing appendix D on the Reliability and Accuracy of Data Inputs and Outputs and appendix E on the Validity of the Electronic Implementation of the Counting Rules for Dáil, European and Local Elections and for Referenda with Dónal Doyle and Pádraig Cunningham.
• Personal Travel Assistant: My PhD work focused on the development of personalised web recommendation strategies for the travel domain
• CBML: I developed the latest version of the Case Based Markup Language

Conference and Workshop Organisation

• Chair: 20th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS) in 2009.
• Workshop Chair: Ambient Information Systems at UbiComp 2008
• Workshop Chair: Ambient Information Systems at PERVASIVE 2007
• Workshop Chair: Case based Reasoning and Context Awareness at ICCBR 2007
• Publications Chair: PERVASIVE 2007
• Assistant Local Organiser: ICAC 2006.
• Student Volunteer Co-Chair: PERVASIVE 2006

Program Committee Membership

I am/was a member of the following program committees:

• 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010)
• Modeling and Reasoning in Context at ECAI 2010 (MRC 2010)
• 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2009)
• 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA 2009)
• 5th International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS 2009)
• 5th International Workshop on Managing Ubiquitous Communications And Services (MUCS 2009)
• 19th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2008)
• The third workshop on Case-based Reasoning and Context-Awareness (CaCoA) 2008
• Modelling and Reasoning in Context 2008 at HCP-2008
• 5th International IEEE Workshop on Management of Ubiquitous Communications and Services 2008
• Knowledge-based User Interface (KUI2008) at ICAS 2008
• Networking for Distributed Knowledge Management (NDKM'07).
• Modelling and Reasoning in Context 2007 at CONTEXT 07
• IEEE International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence 2007
• 4th International Workshop on Management of Ubiquitous Communications and Services 2007
• International Workshop on Case-based Reasoning and Context Awareness 2006

I am also a member of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence (IJACI)

Publications

A List of my publications, along with bibtex and links to download is here. My current h-index is ≥ 14.

Student Supervision

ODCSSS Students

Since 2007 I have been one of the Project Supervisors on the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School (ODCSSS). An ODCSSS internship provides a foundation of basic research skills to 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate interns which will aid them in transforming this research experience into a long term plan for final year research or subsequent research career options. There is more information on the OCCSSS website.

• Deirdre Dalton (2009): Learn to play like Minnesota Fats - augmented reality in the pool-hall
• Poornima Hanumara (2008): Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives
• Caitlin Lustig (2007): Reminding Short-Term Memory Sufferers to Complete Routine Tasks
• Joel Seligstein (2006): Collaborative Visualisation*

Final Year Project Students

In the Computer Science and Informatics in UCD fourth year computer science students are required to undertake a substantial project. The purpose of the project is to introduce the student to a particular field of Computer Science and to give them an opportunity to learn how to undertake a major project, taking it from problem specification through to problem solution. I have supervised the following students' final year projects:

• Dónal Troddyn (2008-2009): Roboboat: Autonomous Yacht Control.
• Colin Smith (2007-2008): Using RFID to Remember
• Steven Byrne (2007-2008): Automatic Jigsaw Assistant
• Colm Mulryan (2007-2008): Ticketyboo - An Online Concert Recommender
• Christine Trant (2007-2008): The Whereabouts Clock*
• Owen Phelan (2007-2008): The Visual Calender*
• Rory McCann (2005-2006): Objects and RDF*

* I was Associate Supervisor to these students.