Materials & Intelligent Systems
Advanced Materials
A major part of the Department’s activities in materials research takes place in the Sami Nasr Institute. This building houses some of the most up-to-date experimental equipment for the purposes and is also home to laboratories belonging to the School of Physics and the School of Chemistry with whom the Department collaborates on projects of joint interest. Work in materials includes basic research in liquid crystals for photonic applications, in particular crystalline alignment configurations and the investigation of problems associated with switching speeds, viewability, contrast and quality of alignment after long-term filed cycling.
Work on Silicon focuses on the fabrication of porous and grooved Silicon structures for optoelectronic applications, the measurement of the photonic properties of 1D crystals and the measurement and modelling of stress and composition in Silicon micro- and nano-structures.
Research in ferromagnetic fluids includes wideband measurement and analysis of the dynamic properties of magnetic fluids, gels and other nano-particle systems, magnetic and dielectric measurements, the study of magnetic composite materials, relaxation and resonance processes and surface effects in nano-particles and hysteresis and isotropic effects in magnetic colloidal suspensions of nano-particles and magnetic beads. There are theoretical studies of quantum dissipative systems and slow relaxation processes in condensed matter.
Principal Investigators:
- Prof. J. K.Vij - liquid crystals; photonic applications.
- Prof. W. T. Coffey - quantum dissipative systems; relaxation processes in condensed matter.
- Prof. P. C. Fannin - ferromagnetic fluids; magnetic composite materials, nano-particle systems
- Dr. T. Perova - porous silicon microstructures;
Communications Engineering
Work in this area takes place in the Centre for Telecommunication Value-chain Research, CTVR, located in the Lloyd Institute, where the Department collaborates closely with the Department of Computer Science. Activities centre on future communications systems with particular emphasis on reconfigurable and software radio, cognitive wireless networks and dynamic spectrum allocation regimes.
Principal Investigators:
- Dr. L. E. Doyle - wireless networks; software radio; dynamic spectrum allocation.
- Mr. L. Dowling - communication systems theory, DSP in communications systems.
Digital Media and Systems
Research in this area covers a broad spectrum of digital and image processing techniques and their applications. Audio work involves the investigation and analysis of digital signal processing algorithms for developments and applications in audio signal processing and room acoustics, particularly techniques to automate and enhance the recording of audio in e-Learning and meetings; techniques for processing signals from arrays of microphones, segmenting signals into speech and noise and methods for fusing audio and video signals for tracking moving talkers. Work is in progress in Psychoacoustics to relate the developments in Cognitive Science to theories of music perception, and to bring insights gained from that activity to engineering applications, especially with regard to issues which relate to acoustic perception, music, and audio recording technologies.
Video work includes the development of signal processing algorithms for digital multimedia, in particular for motion estimation, video object segmentation, video and film restoration or enhancement and more recently content based video analysis. The work of the Sigmedia group recently won an Oscar in the technical section of the Academy Awards.
Statistical work in digital signal processing involves Bayesian signal and system identification, Bayesian signal processing in medicine and communications, image segmentation and analysis and digital watermarking of images.
There is also work in the study of system architectures and their implementation in hardware, primarily for video and audio applications related to the above topics. This involves computational logic design and implementation for DSP architectures with attention to speed and power considerations.
Principal Investigators:
- Prof. F. M. Boland - audio acoustics, sound localisation, e-learning.
- Prof. A. C. Kokaram - image processing, video restoration, digital television.
- Dr. J. B. Foley - digital systems design, audio acoustics, e-learning.
- Dr. D. J. Furlong - psychoacoustics, music technology, ambient sound technology.
- Dr. A. P. Quinn - speech recognition, speech synthesis, Bayesian techniques.
- Dr. N. Harte - video processing, speech recognition, digital systems design.
- Mr. L. Dowling - image processing, image compression, digital watermarking.