Newsletter March 2016
INSIDE Prof. Mike Hinchey Elected President of IFIP
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At its General Assembly, 9 October 2015 in Daejeon, Korea
WELCOME TO THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE LERO NEWSLETTER
Events Attended
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A summary of recent events our scientists attended in Ireland and abroad
Keynotes and distinguished Lectures
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John Romeros talk on his grass-root journey from submitting game projects to tech magazines to becoming one of the worlds top game designers
Education & Outreach
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Intel and Lero support Junior Cycle students in ‘Exploring Coding
Welcome to the latest issue of the Lero newsletter. Since our last issue Lero members have been very busy both at home and abroad. Education and Outreach has had an exceptionally busy time not least its involvement in the launch of a project which is designed to support schools and teachers in exploring the coding short course now available under the Framework for Junior
Cycle 2015. Several Lero members have received honours and recognitions. In addition, Lero now welcomes over 40 new members, spread throughout each of our member institutes. We are delighted to have them join us.
Prof. Mike Hinchey Elected President of IFIP At its General Assembly, 9 October 2015 in Daejeon, Korea, IFIP (the International Federation for Information Processing) elected Prof. Mike Hinchey as its 18th President. Hinchey will serve as President-Elect until the next General Assembly (San Jose, Costa Rica, September 2016) following which he will assume a 3-year term as President. ABOUT IFIP IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing, is the global professional federation of societies and associations for people working in Information and Communications Technologies and Sciences. Established under the auspices of UNESCO
in 1960 and recognised by the United Nations, IFIP represents ICT professional associations from more than 50 countries and regions with a total membership of over half a million. It also brings together more than 3,500 scientists from industry and academia, organising them into over 100 Working Groups and 13 Technical Committees to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing. Based in Austria, IFIP organises and supports over 100 conferences each year, fostering the distribution of research and knowledge to academics and industry practitioners alike. Website: http://ifip.org
ESA Visit As part of the LEON Backend LLVM Project (a joint project with ESA), Dr Emil Vassev and Chris Dewhurst, both Lero @ UL visited Cobham Gaisler in Gothenburg, Sweden. The purpose of this visit was to start a special integration task of the project. The Lero developed compiler for the ESA’s LEON processors needs to be integrated with an integration testing environment which will be developed by Cobham Gaisler. Regular tests with over 6000 predefined test cases and a benchmark with the GCC compiler have begun.
International Award for Prof. Brian Fitzgerald Brian Fitzgerald has been awarded the inaugural Sandra Slaughter Award by the Association of Information Systems (AIS). This award recognizes long standing members who have provided leadership within the Association, particularly through such activities as participating in the SIGs/ chapters/colleges, strengthening the conferences, and participating in AIS-sponsored journals. A committee of senior AIS scholars reviewed the many nominations received and selected Prof. Fitzgerald as the inaugural award winner.
AIS is the premier professional association for individuals and organizations who lead the research, teaching, practice, and study of information systems worldwide. AIS has members from over 90 countries, and is comprised of three different regions: Region1, The Americas; Region 2, Europe, The Middle East and Africa; Region 3, Asia and The Pacific.
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New Lero People We have had quite a few new members join Lero in the last few months A big welcome to Yahya Albalawi Faeq Alrimawi Fayz Alshehri Doaa Amin Atif Azad Ann Barcomb Marija Bezbradica Shane Brady Andrzej Bujok Bora Caglayan Colin Callinan Niall Connolly Alejandro Estrada Gomez Maciej Gazda Habtom Gidey Frederik Gossen
George Grispos Babak Habibnia Ronald Jabangwe Maciej Kaczmarski Neil Keane Hamsini Ketheswarasarma Anna-Lena Lamprecht Aleksas Mamkaitis Aisling McGlinchey Alex Pena Reka Petercsak Zohreh Porzolfaghar Mohammad Abdur Razzak Kitija Trektere Xuemeng Zhang Hamid Zorgani
ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR MEDICAL DEVICES Dr Fergal McCaffrey has been invited by the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Kathleen Lynch, to join the Committee for Medical Devices for a period beginning 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2020.
Events Attended
ARM’s Lab in Cambridge On January 28th David Gregg (Lero@TCD), visited ARM’s Research and Development Lab. in Cambridge, www.arm.com/support/university/, to give an invited talk about Lero research on the MULTICORE work programme. The talk was well attended by ARM researchers from Cambridge and via video link from ARM in Austin, Texas. ARM does a great deal of research and development in fields relevant to Lero, particularly in software for embedded systems.
EuSEM Conference Prof. Tiziana Margaria (Lero@TCD) participated in the EuSEM conference (9th European Congress on Emergency Medicine”, http://www.eusemcongress.org/en/ 10-14 Oct. in Torino, Italy), where she gave two invited talks about “Computer-aided female intuition”, as part of the session on Women in Emergency Medicine
New role for Anthony Dr Anthony Ventresque, Lero@ UCD, is changing roles. Anthony has been with PEL in UCD since January 2012 a Postdoc then a Research Fellow. He was awarded an SFI industry fellowship in May 2014 and has worked part-time with IBM Research since then. He will now take up a 5 year lecturer position with the School of Computer Science at UCD and will continue to be a member of Lero. We wish Anthony every success for the future
Editorial Role for Brian Fitzgerald Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, Chief Scientist at Lero, has been appointed Associate Editor at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Prof. Kieran Conboy and Denis Dennehy attended the Shingo European Summit in Cork. The two day event was facilitated by the Shingo Institute (Utah University) and provided a platform for keynote speeches and plenary sessions by practitioners engaged in organisational-wide change programmes.
FESTA At the recent FESTA Project Management Group meeting held in Istanbul, Turkey, Prof. Ita Richardson presented the FESTA/Aspire Career Management System to the project team and the Scientific Advisory group. This system has been built using the Lero Aspire Demonstrator software. The output from FESTA research has been organised into the Aspire Decision Support format by Ita and Dr Clare O’Hagan, FESTA Research Fellow, at University of Limerick. Health Informatics student Seun Adebowale has worked with Dr John Noll to develop the FESTA/Aspire system. The software is currently being tested with researchers within the FESTA partner Universities.
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BEST PAPERS
16th International Conference Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE 2016) We are delighted to announce that the 16th International Conference Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE 2016) will be hosted in DCU by Dr Paul Clarke and Prof. Rory O’Connor in June 2016. Lero researchers are particularly encouraged to submit both regular and short papers.
Best paper awards have been presented to Dr Fergal McCaffery and Dr Silvana Togneri MacMahon from the Regulated Software Research Centre for papers presented at The First International Conference on Fundamentals and Advances in Software Systems Integration (FASSI) Conference 2015. Dr McCaffery’s paper entitled Medical Device Software as a Subsystem of an Overall Medical Device: The MDevSPICE® Experience was co-authored by Dr Marion Lepmets and Dr Paul Clarke. Dr MacMahon’s paper entitled Development of the MedITNet Assessment Method Enabling Healthcare Delivery Organisation Self- Assessment against IEC 80001-1 was co-authored by Dr Fergal McCaffery and Dr Frank Keenan. The papers were selected as “Best Papers” based on the reviews of the original submission, the camera-ready version, and the presentation during the conference. Only two best paper awards were presented and both were won by members of the RSRC.
Hackathon Winners Podium for Takfarinas and Quentin Quentin Bragard and Takfarinas Saber (Lero@UCD) won the third prize at the biggest Blockchain Hackathon in Europe which happened in Dublin between the 6th and 8th November with a project called “Open Charity”, a safe, decentralized system allowing you to issue IOUs (“I Owe
You” tokens) for the benefit of Charity. The project was designed to facilitate the request for assistance by global charities or local entities to make the whole process of giving money, food or furniture, easier and more transparent. Well done and Congratulations!
ITiCSE Vilinus 2015 Dr Sarah Beecham co-lead a working group in August ‘15 at the Innovation & Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (ITiCSE). Dr John Noll also took a very active role in producing the 38 page paper that the editors described as “a very, very nice contribution. …. Teachers of Global Software Engineering will be glad to have your report to rely on. Good job”. The Paper “Challenges and
Recommendations for the Design and Conduct of Global Software Engineering Courses: A Systematic Review” will appear soon in the ACM proceedings of the Working Group Reports of the 2015 on Innovation & Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (ITiCSE’15), Vilnius, Lithuania, ACM.
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3RD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CROWD SOURCING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING The 3rd International Workshop on Crowd Sourcing in Software Engineering (CSI-SE) will take place during the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Austin, TX, USA. The workshop is being organized by Klaas-Jan Stol (Lero @ UL) and Thomas LaToza from George Mason University, USA. The workshop will be a forum to present emerging research and trends on the use of crowdsourcing in a software engineering context. A call for papers will be published soon.
IEEE FELLOW Congratulations to Prof. João Marques-Silva on becoming an IEEE fellow, a remarkable accomplishment, and well deserved.
Keynotes and distinguished Lectures Mike Hinchey gave a Distinguished Lecture at INESC-ID, University of Lisbon. Takfarinas Saber (Lero@UCD) gave a keynote on “Multi-objective VM Reassignment for Large Scale Data Centres” at the First International Workshop on Sustainable Data Centres and Cloud Computing (SD3C), co-located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing. The event was organised by Barry O’Sullivan from Insight@UCC
Presentations, Talks and Invited Speakers Dr Paidi O’Reilly from University College Cork delivered an insightful and thought provoking presentation at the Lero IS seminar series at NUIG. His presentation “Designing effective theory for research impact” attracted academics and practitioners who enjoyed a highly interactive seminar. At the 20th HISI Annual Conference & Scientific Symposium, Prof. Ita Richardson presented on App Development: the good, the bad…… and the ugly!, at ‘There’s an App for that’, workshop discussing the Role of Apps in Health ICT.
‘Italian Job’ for Claus Claus Pahl has left DCU and moved to a new role in Bolzano. Lero wishes him every success for the future.
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Education & Outreach BT Young Scientist Expo Clare McInerney and Mehvish Rashid represented Lero at the SFI stand at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition on Thursday January 7th. This is the 52nd year of the BTYSE with 550 projects shortlisted and on display at the exhibition.
Technology Workshops Lero members Fayola Peters, Solomon Gizaw, Anila Mjeda, Frederik Gossen and Clare McInerney ran Technology Workshops from 9th – 11th November during Science Week. The visiting primary school children played with Lego WeDo, Lego Mindstorms, NAO Robot, Scratch, LightBot and 3D visualization tools. The workshops were fully booked out and students were very engaged and curious about all the tools and technologies.
JOHN ROMERO ID SOFTWARE John Romeros talk on his grass-root journey from submitting game projects to tech magazines to becoming one of the worlds top game designers was very enjoyable and informative. His particular focus on programming principles that he has applied throughout his career to deliver and manage software projects added practical insights for other like minded students, programmers and game enthusiasts. John did an excellent job of presenting a concise and interactive talk over a large spectrum of technological challenges and software topics. software topics which include innovate breakthroughs made during the development of projects such as Commander Keen, Doom and Quake. John is an award-winning game designer, level designer and programmer whose work spans over 130 games, 107 of which have been published commercially, including the iconic works Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. Romero has worked in the mobile, hardcore, mid-core, casual and MMO space. Romero has co-founded eight successful game companies including the likes of id Software, Gazillion Entertainment and, most recently, Loot Drop which is celebrating its 5th anniversary in 2015. He is considered to be among the world’s top game designers, and his products have won well over 100 awards. One of the earliest indie developers, Romero began working in the game space in 1979 on mainframes before moving to the Apple II in 1981. He is a completely self-taught programmer, designer and artist, having drawn his inspirations from early Apple II programmers. Romero co-owns Loot Drop and Romero Games.
To mark the 20th annual Science Week, which took place from the 8th – 15th November, An Taoiseach Enda Kenny, T.D. attended a showcase of – Irish Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) at Government Buildings on Thursday Nov 5th. The event provided an insight into the inspirational and important scientific work being carried out across the country at all levels from primary schools to universities and leading companies such as Pfizer, EMC Ireland, IMB, MSD Ireland and Eli Lilly. An Taoiseach and Minister for Skills, Research & Innovation, Damien English, TD, met with a variety of people involved with STEM in Ireland. Clare McInerney and Mike Hinchey were delighted to attend and participate in the celebrations and STEM demonstrations.
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INTEL AND LERO SUPPORT JUNIOR CYCLE STUDENTS IN ‘EXPLORING CODING The introduction of computer coding courses for secondary schools has received a boost following the announcement of a collaborative initiative between Intel Ireland and Lero.The project is designed to support schools and teachers in exploring the coding short course now available under the Framework for Junior Cycle 2015. Intel Ireland has donated 900 Galileo Gen 2 Boards and teacher kits to a cohort of 19 post-primary schools. Students will engage in technology and design-related activities with the use of these resources within this 12 month project.
EU CODE WEEK As part of EU Code Week Lero hosted two programming workshops in St. Mary’s Secondary School, Corbally Limerick and in Presentation Convent Mitchelstown Cork. Europe Code Week is a grassroots initiative which aims to bring coding and digital literacy to everybody in a fun and engaging way. It ran from 10th -18th October 2015.
Lero & Galway Careers Night Eoin Cullina presented the SFI Smart Futures Stand at St Jarlath’s College, Tuam, Co. Galway Careers night with Ronan Concannon of Boston Scientific.
THESIS in 3 Following the UL Thesis in 3 regional finals, Feng Chen represented Lero@UL at the Thesis in 3 National Finals on November 4th. Her presentation title was “Don’t fire the architects, identifying architecturally significant requirements”. For full details about this event see http://thesisin3.com/.
“We are delighted to support schools in this innovative and exciting coding project. It will give students an insight into technology, and allow the development of both logical and digital skills in a fun, collaborative, and innovative learning environment,” said Paul Phelan, Public Affairs Operations Manager, Intel at the launch. Tailored training and online support will be provided to teachers by the JCT Support Service, with the support of Lero and Intel. Clare McInerney, who is Education and Outreach Manager in Lero said, “This project will allow students to see how interesting and creative a career in computing can be. This initiative will enable students to make informed choices about their future studies in the field of computing.“ The 19 schools for this initiative were chosen from over 120 entries from post-primary schools from all sectors, and participating teachers will receive two days of initial training, and further online and regional support. Further information on this initiative can be found at the JCT website www.jct.ie
Hour of Code
ICT @ Rockchapel Primary School Prof. Ita Richardson has re-commenced visits to Rockchapel Primary School, where she spends some time each week discussing ICT with children in 3rd-6th Class. The school is next door to ADA-Security, where Ita is researching while on an SFI Industry Fellowship
Lero ran Hour of Code workshops in 3 schools during the celebration of Computer Science Education Week Dec 7-13. Schools involved in the Hour of Code were St. Nessan’s Community College, Limerick, Coláiste Nano Nagle, Limerick and Cashel Community School, Tipperary. The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. https://hourofcode.com/ie
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