Intelligent Media & Human Communication

This research focuses on the innovation and impact in technologies to enhance human communication and their interaction with digital content.

Research

The diversity of ways of supporting digital communication between people and the sheer volume of content being directed at them by such communications has become overwhelming. The combination of ‘traditional’ digital communication modes such as email, messaging, video, and more emergent modes such as social media, location awareness, twitter, speech interaction and smart phone apps, have created many benefits for human collaboration and interaction but also significant challenges for their users.

This research theme focuses on the impact of today’s digital technologies on the way we communicate and researches innovations to enhance how we interact with information (content) in a way which empowers us. Putting intelligence in to the content and communications means enabling that content and communications to be more easily discovered, analysed, understood, transformed between different languages, easily delivered through different modalities and adapted to address the needs, situation and preferences of the communicating parties.

This research encompasses all facets of next generation digital content and human interaction including content creation, curation, analysis, discovery, transformation, personalization as well as interaction and delivery. A key aspect of the research is to embed intelligence in the content and communications so that information and interaction is dynamically analysed, adapted and delivered to suit the user’s task, intent or preferences where appropriate.    
Trinity researchers are pioneering research into the impact and discovery of new communication and content technology in many areas such as Education, Health, Language, Business and Humanities.  This theme provides a platform for such research and an integration of the emergent ideas.

Benefit to Society

Today’s modern communications technology are massively increasing the volume and velocity of content directed at the individual. This makes it increasingly more difficult to search, comprehend and utilize the constant flow of information available today.  The focus of the theme to empower people in creating, using and communicating with each other more easily. It seeks to research how people can utilize existing and new technology to communicate globally whilst still controlling and adapting this communication to their own needs, contexts and preferences. 

The economic benefit of this TCD research has already seen significant discoveries and research development is areas such as Human Computer Interaction, Dynamic Analysis and Personalisation of Media and Content, Speech based interaction with applications and devices, novel collaboration technologies, new social media services, as well as developing new models for informal learning and knowledge sharing. These discoveries and research achievements have led to multiple TCD campus companies, strong partnership with multinational as well as indigenous companies as well as partnership with work leading research institutions.

Research at Trinity

Trinity is host and coordinator of the CNGL Centre which focuses on next generation technologies for intelligence in content and human communications systems. CNGL is focused on empowering people to interact digitally with each other, in their own language, according to their own culture, preferences and contexts. It is a international research centre focusing on empowering people in creating, searching, analyzing, translating, adapting and interacting with content, services and other people. 

The IC&C theme also incorporates multiple schools and multidisciplinary research centres within TCD, such as the Learnovate Centre which is focused on applied research in informal learning enhanced by technology and the Centre for Health Informatics which researches communication, collaboration and medical information sharing within healthcare settings.  Other areas in TCD with which this theme has strong collaboration include Humanities and Business.

Research Champion

The research champion for this theme is Professor Vincent Wade.