Minister announces funding for two Lero-led projects to respond to pressing needs arising from COVID-19

Two Lero-led projects are among those announced by the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris, TD, today, as part of a €5.5 million investment under Science Foundation Ireland’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Research and Innovation Programme. Announcing the awards Minister Harris, said: “Today I am pleased to announce a further...

Researchers from five universities awarded prestigious Lero Director’s Prizes

Eight researchers from five leading Irish universities were awarded Lero Director’s Prizes at an online ceremony today. This is the second year of the annual awards presented by Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, to honour members working across its 11 academic partner institutes nationwide. Awards were presented to academics, researchers and...

How AI can lead the way in battle against Covid-19

Opinion: Artificial Intelligence can be used to predict which Coronavirus infected patient may develop severe respiratory disease First published in BusinessPost.ie, on Saturday, 29 August, 2020. The rapid emergence and spread of Covid-19 is putting health systems under unprecedented pressure, with a surge in demand for treatment, diagnosis and contact tracing to curtail the spread...

Getting to the heart of machine learning and complex humans

Profile: Abeba Birhane, PhD student at UCD’s Complex Software Lab and Lero First published in The Irish Times, on Thursday, 27 August, 2020. Abeba Birhane recently made a big discovery – that an academic library containing millions of images used to train artificial intelligence systems had privacy and ethics issues, and that it included racist,...

Lero researcher wins national athletics title

Lero researcher Stephen Gaffney won the national title in the men’s 100m race in the Athletics Ireland Irish Life Health National Senior Championships on August 23. Stephen is a Research Assistant working with Dr Anthony Ventresque in University College Dublin. Stephen runs with UCD Athletics Club and completed the race in 10.63. Please visit the...

Leverage increased social media activity for better demand forecasting

Opinion: COVID-19 has transformed customer behaviour from the way people shop to the products and services they buy. These changed shopping patterns are likely to last into the near future. They may even extend into the longer term because, on average, a new behaviour persisting for about two months becomes a habit. Retailers, if they...

Twitter and Facebook posts can predict shoppers’ intentions accurately

Large retailers, family-run enterprises and small craft stores can accurately forecast shoppers’ intentions using a social media analysis framework developed by researchers at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and Maynooth University. Prof Markus Helfert from Lero who is leading the Digital Retail Research Programme at Maynooth University said: “This information can...

Lero researchers and Motion-S receive Industrial Fellowship Award

Lero researchers Dr Barry Sheehan and Dr Finbarr Murphy of the Emerging Risk Group at University of Limerick, in collaboration with Luxembourg firm Motion-S, have been selected by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) for funding under the Industrial Fellowships Programme.  The funding will support Leandro Masello, a data scientist with Motion-S, to undertake a PhD project in co-supervision between...

Computer Vision Innovation Award for Lero’s Abeba Birhane

Lero and UCD PhD student Abeba Birhane has won an award in the United States for a research paper which, while still under peer review, has already resulted in the withdrawal of an 80 million image dataset used to train AI.  Abeba, along with Dr Vinay Prabhu, principal machine learning scientist at UnifyID, examined the problematic opacity, data...

Lero to expand with addition of WIT and TSSG researchers

Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, has announced that it is to expand its research capabilities with the addition of Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) as an academic partner.Hosted by University of Limerick (UL) Lero currently brings together expert software teams from universities and institutes of technology across Ireland in a co-ordinated centre...