In January 2004, Dr Andy Way of the School of Computing received a grant for a 2-year project aimed at developing an Example-Based Machine Translation (MT) system for Chinese-English that will learn from previously submitted translations. This research is funded by SFI and the Royal Irish Academy. This work is being undertaken with colleagues from the MT Lab at Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China, led by Prof. Tiejun Zhao.

Dr Way and two postgraduate students, Nano Gough and Mary Hearne, visited China for 3 weeks in March this year for the inaugural project meeting, and the Chinese partners are currently visiting DCU on a follow-up meeting. Work is progressing according to schedule, and both groups look forward to continuing this research project in 2005.

Mick Burke, a PhD student at the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) in the School of Computing, has been awarded a prestigious IBM Fellowship Award which will fund his research for one year from October 2005.

These awards are very competitive and are highly sought after. Mick is co-supervised by Josef Van Genabith and Andy Way in the area of automatic annotation of treebanks with grammatical information which is the extraction of dictionary entries and grammar rules from large collection of texts for natural language understanding; a computer can interpret the fundamental workings of a language. This is the second year in a row that students in the NCLT have received one of these awards, following the success last year of Nano Gough (also supervised by Andy).

Final year B.Sc. in Computer Applications students, Cillian Sharkey and Trevor Johnson, were recently presented with IBM ThinkPad laptops as prizes for winning IBM Dublin Software Lab's Eclipse - Open Source Software Innovation Competition. The students won the award for their final year project, Networked System Administration, which developed a network administration system built on Eclipse open source technology. The system allows schools to easily deploy and maintain their computer networks with few resources. They and five students from other Irish universities were awarded their prizes at a ceremony held at the Dublin Software Lab in Santry, north Dublin. Each winner gave a presentation on how they had used Eclipse to develop their projects.

On June 18th, a group of Second Year students from local secondary schools visited the School of Computing as part of DCU's Junior Summer Science Camp. The students took part in a workshop on automatic speech recognition and other aspects speech technology, which demonstrated just one of the many applications of computing. They blended their own creativity with a dialogue-building toolkit to produce simple interactive programmes that mimicked TV quizzes and virtual dating.

On Wednesday, June 9th, the graduating classes of the B.Sc. in Computer Applications and B.Sc. in Applied Computational Linguistics gave open demonstrations of their final year projects to DCU staff and industry representatives. Dublin City University is well known for its strong relationship with industry, and this annual display provides an opportunity for the industrial and business communities to view the high standard and broad range of development work carried out by the graduating students of the School of Computing.

The wide variety of projects on display at the event was impressive, with educational technology, multimedia, mobile phone technology, and games technology the most popular application areas. Among the most interesting projects were an "Artificial Intelligence Wireless Virtual Pet", which can be run on mobile phones, an "Escape from DCU" computer game that requires players to eliminate DCU students and lecturers, and a version of the "Talking Clock" in Irish.

To view the full range of projects presented, download a copy of the Final Year Projects booklet.