Algorithms for the Solution of Systems of Coupled Second-Order Ordinary Differential Equations

Several step-by-step methods for the computer solution systems of coupled second-order ordinary differential equations, are examined from the point of view of efficiency “time-wise” and “storage-wise”. Particular reference is made to a system arising in the close-coupling approximation of the Schroedinger equation. The stability of the solution is also considered

Tunepal: Searching a Digital Library of Traditional Music Scores

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the Tunepal project as an example of a music information retrieval (MIR) system that is having an impact on how musicians access, learn and play traditional Irish music around the world. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes the functionality of the Tunepal system: consisting of the tune corpus, the web site tunepal.org and mobile apps supporting iOS and Android OS. Tunepal facilitates query-by-title and query-by-playing music (QBP) searches and allows a musician to retrieve and playback scores amongst other supported functions. Findings – Tunepal has been favorably received and musicians report that the system is being used in a variety of scenarios including archiving and the preparation of sleeve notes for commercial recordings. Tunepal has a growing user base in 25 countries. Originality/value – The comprehensive tune corpus (over 16,000 compositions), the query-by-playing technology and the fact that the mobile apps provide access to the corpus in situ in traditional music sessions and classes make this project uniquely useful

A system for automatically annotating traditional Irish music field recordings

This paper presents MATT2 (Machine Annotation of Traditional Tunes). MATT2 is a novel system which can automatically annotate field recordings of traditional Irish music with useful metadata such as tune name, key signature, time signature, composer and discography. MATT2 works by using a number of algorithms to automatically transcribe digital audio to be annotated to the ABC music notation language. It then compares these transcriptions against a corpus of 860 human made transcriptions in ABC using a variation of the edit distance algorithm. Results using MATT2 to annotate fifty recordings of flute and fiddle tunes demonstrate a high success rate at annotating recordings made by different musicians. Additionally, several of the recordings successfully annotated in testing MATT2 were recorded in imperfect conditions, with badly degraded audio

Website Engagibility: A Step Beyond Usability.

There is a continuing need for quality eCommerce websites which satisfy their owner’s perspective of quality of design and visitor’s perspective of quality of use. More particularly there is a need for website owners to be able to specify what constitutes a website that will fully engage site visitors and consequently what needs to be designed into the website in order to insure return on investment. This paper argues that the term usability is inappropriate to quality websites and that website engagibility is a step beyond usability. The paper reports continuing research which seeks to identify the requirements of website engagibility, and to provide a mathematical solution for measuring and comparing website performance. The research relies on the Software Quality Star to provide an end-to-end conceptual model for studying website quality. In particular it focuses on the potential of a website’s design to support the engagibility of visitors. Using a comprehensive set of Quality-of-product criteria and counts for a set of eCommerce websites the paper explains how a ratio value can be calculated for a website. These metrics specifically avoid reliance on website traffic data and visitor statistics and the study concerns itself with website structure and design criteria. The approach is influenced by assessment and predictive measurement theory. Then, using Metric Ratio Analysis the paper shows how website engagibility performance ratings can be determined

Using the Crytek Game Engine in the Technological University Dublin

It is envisaged that within the next 10 years. the Technological University Dublin (DIT), Ireland’s largest third level university, will move to a new campus in Grangegorman, located in the north inner city of Dublin This site is currently being used as a hospital. It has twelve listed buildings and is located in a densely populated urban community. This paper describes how the Crytek 3D Game engine is being used to create a game MOD (modification) of the current hospital site, how it will be used in the construction and public consultation process of the new campus and how students in the DIT are learning computer science in an new way

Software quality challenges.

This paper sets out a number of challenges facing the software quality community. These challenges relate to the broader view of quality and the consequences for software quality definitions. These definitions are related to eight perspectives of software quality in an end-to-end product life cycle. Research and study of software quality has traditionally focused on product quality for management information systems and this paper considers the challenge of defining additional quality factors for alternative domains like the World Wide Web

Password-Based Authentication and Phishing

The most common mechanism for online authenti- cation is the username-password. Majority of e- commerce applications are designed to provide pass- word authentication via an HTML form, with the assumption that the user needs to determine if it is safe to enter the password. In order to avoid phish- ing attacks, the user is expected to distinguish be- tween a phishing and a genuine website by checking the browser security indicators. Alternative authentication models suggest using images for authentication, introducing variations of Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) pro- tocols into TLS, using digital objects as passwords. Some authentication models suggest sending one- time password (OTP) tokens out-of-band to the user. Most computer users have too many passwords and keep forgetting them. Common issue for all authen- tication models is how to restore a legitimate user access to their account without authentication, i.e. password reset. In this paper, we investigate current password based authentication models and review their impact on phishing. We investigate two categories of issues 1) deployment obstacles for the \u27stronger\u27 authenti- cation models, and 2) security issues created by the number of passwords user needs to memorize

RE: Towards realistic and flexible advance care planning.

\u27Think Ahead\u27 is more than an advance care directive. It is this, but also a comprehensive end of life planning tool, facilitating the individual to engage with their family, friends and professionals to make and record a broad number of preferences regarding end of life. It particularly addresses issues known to be of concern to the Irish Public4. It is a citizen-led tool, developed from a prolonged process of engagement with the public, patients, and medical and legal professions. Its development has been informed with reference to the international peer reviewed literature, and by pragmatic studies conducted in the community setting, evaluating feasibility and acceptability to patients and to health care professionals

Significantly reducing the processing times of high-speed photometry data sets using a distributed computing model

The scientific community is in the midst of a data analysis crisis. The increasing capacity of scientific CCD instrumentation and their falling costs is contributing to an explosive generation of raw photometric data. This data must go through a process of cleaning and reduction before it can be used for high precision photometric analysis. Many existing data processing pipelines either assume a relatively small dataset or are batch processed by a High Performance Computing centre. A radical overhaul of these processing pipelines is required to allow reduction and cleaning rates to process terabyte sized datasets at near capture rates using an elastic processing architecture. The ability to access computing resources and to allow them to grow and shrink as demand fluctuates is essential, as is exploiting the parallel nature of the datasets. A distributed data processing pipeline is required. It should incorporate lossless data compression, allow for data segmentation and support processing of data segments in parallel. Academic institutes can collaborate and provide an elastic computing model without the requirement for large centralized high performance computing data centers. This paper demonstrates how a base 10 order of magnitude improvement in overall processing time has been achieved using the ACN pipeline , a distributed pipeline spanning multiple academic institutes

Checking the weight of children in general practice

TX-2-170Childhood overweight is a serious health concern. Checking the weight of the child can be done in the primary care setting, where GPs have the opportunity to check the weight of children attending for routine care.It is hypothesised GPs are unwilling to check the weight of children, concerned about upsetting children and parents. It is further hypothesised children and parents are not upset when the weight of the child is checked