Category: News

As part of the SFI 2018 PhD Recruitment Programme, Dr Andrew Hines, who joined Insight@UCD as a funded investigator during the summer, has recruited Alessandro Ragano as a PhD student. After completing his MSc at Politecnico di Milano, Alessandro spent time as a research assistant at Fraunhofer IIS. He will be co-supervised by Dr Emmanouil Benetos of the Alan Turing Institute and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). As part of his PhD programme Alessandro will be spending one year in London at the ATI headquarters next door to the British Library. His research will investigate using data-driven quality prediction models for digitally restored audio archives. Welcome to QxLab and Insight@UCD Alessandro.

 

 

 

 

QxLab at EUSIPCO: 26th European Signal Processing Conference

Hamed was in Prague in July presenting his research to the tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks. His paper looks at how a web application could help SDNs to provide users with a better quality of experience.

In the Untouchables, Seán Connery’s character observes the need to match the tool to the job. Commenting on the dangers for someone who “brings a knife to a gunfight”.

Daniel was in Queen’s University Belfast at the 29th IEEE Irish Signals and systems conference presenting his work on property preserving encryption analysis. He carried out micro-benchmarks on MySQL and CryptDB. Will deterministic suffice or homomorphic encryption needed to maintain functionality?

Andrew also attended the conference and co-chaired a session.

QxLab’s Dr Miroslaw Narbutt presented work on an objective spatial audio model for compressed ambisonic quality estimation. The paper received an honourable mention in the best paper awards. Andrew also presented the winning bid pitch to host QoMEX in Ireland in 2020.

Mirek explains that “people often hear things before we see them”. Content creators need spatial audio to deliver immersive VR. Introducing AMBIQUAL: a tool to predict quality for compressed spatial audio.

The SFI CONNECT Research Centre for Future Networks, represented by QxLab’s Dr Andrew Hines (CONNECT Funded Investigator at UCD), has won the 2018 US-Ireland Research Innovation Award in the category of ‘Research Centre with links to the US corporate sector in Ireland’.

Read Irish Times coverage here.

The award was jointly presented by the Royal Irish Academy and the American Chamber of Commerce to recognise excellence in research innovation. The announcement was made on Friday, 18 May at the American Chamber of Commerce annual dinner at the Clayton Hotel, Burlington Road, in Dublin. The event was attended by the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys, T.D.; the President of the Royal Irish Academy, Professor Peter Kennedy; and members of the US-Ireland business community.

Andrew’s project is a collaboration with Google and is called ViSQOL, a software platform for evaluating audio quality on the web by “looking” at sounds. It can predict sound quality in a wide range of internet scenarios from streaming music and video conferencing to virtual reality 3D spatial audio.

Based on previous research undertaken by Andrew to examine how speech would sound from different hearing aids, Google have supported the development of this research innovation to examine its application in video-conferencing. The result is ViSQOL: a software platform that can predict sound quality in a wide range of internet scenarios including music, video streaming, video conferencing and virtual reality 3D spatial audio.

Andrew’s work spans several research projects from his time as a postdoc in Trinity College Dublin, as a CONNECT Funded Investigator at DIT, and now in UCD.

American Chamber of Commerce.
Photo Chris Bellew /Fennell Photography Copyright 2018

QxLab began life in Dublin Institute of Technology in 2015. It has moved to a new home in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. The majority of the lab have moved to UCD: PhD students Daniel Becker, Rahul Jaiswal and visiting researcher Helard Martinez. Research Fellow Dr Miroslaw Narbutt will be based at DIT will continue working full time with QxLab on a research project developing QoE models for ambisonic audio funded by Google, Inc. through the SFI CONNECT Research Centre.