The first AIC Annual Conference was held on Friday 12th of November in the Crowne Plaza Hotel In Dublin. The conference was attended by researchers, industry partners, state agencies and the AIC Advisory Board. The AIC (Adaptive Information Cluster) is a cross-disciplinary research cluster incorporating the CDVP and NCSR (from DCU) as well as the SMI group from UCD. The mission of the AIC is to integrate research on adaptive sensor networks, content extraction and adaptive utilization and to collaborate with industry partners and state bodies to develop applications in areas such as health management, traffic management, environmental monitoring and personalized retailing.

The CDVP have once again preformed very well at the 14th Annual TREC benchmarking exercise and conference, recently held in Washington. This year, the CDVP took part in four research efforts; in large scale web-search, novelty detection, genomic information retrieval and Video retrieval (part of the TRECVID workshop). For aspects of both the novelty detection experiments and the video retrieval experiments, CDVP research systems performed better than those of other participants from academic and industrial research groups worldwide.

The inaugural Practicum Forum for the M.Sc. in Security & Forensic Computing was held on Wednesday 24th November. This innovative degree is a one-year full-time Masters programme which teaches the practical aspects associated with computer security and computer-based crime and the principles underlying crime prevention and security enhancement.

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At DCU Open Day on Saturday, November 20th, the School of Computing held talks its B.Sc. in Computer Applications degree throughout the day, and the Irish Computer Society provided an insight into careers and job prospects for IT graduates. Recent graduates demonstrated their impressive final year projects, which included computer games, virtual reality machines and an Irish version of the talking clock, and three lucky visitors won prizes in our open day competition.

Our competition winners were as follows:

Many thanks to all those who entered our competition and who attended talks on the day.

Visit the DCU website for full details of our B.Sc. in Computer Applications degree

Joseph Morris and Renaat Verbruggen of the School of Computing are hosting a one-day workshop:

Software Testing: New Demands and New Strategies
Wednesday 15th December, Hilton Hotel, Dublin

It is aimed at anyone who has a professional interest in software testing, whether technical or managerial.

In November 2004, the School of Computing's Prof. Josef van Genabith received a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator grant 2004-2008, worth 839,032 euro, for research on Treebank-Based Induction of Wide-Coverage Probabilistic Constraint-Based Grammatical Resources for Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French, German and English, funding 6 PhD students and 2 Post-Docs. This award is in conjunction with the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) here in the School of Computing.

The project builds on and extends research carried out under a previous Enterprise Ireland funded Basic Research project on machine learning deep, constraint-based, probabilistic grammatical resources.

At DCU Open Day, you can find out all you need to know about DCU and our BSc in Computer Applications degree. Talks will take place in the School of Computing every 45 minutes from 10.30am to 3.45pm, and visitors will have the chance to meet with students and lecturers of the programme. You will also have the opportunity to view some of the interesting projects completed by this year's graduating class.
For full details of DCU Open Day, visit http://www.dcu.ie/prospective/open_day.shtml

Martin Orr, the Methodist College, Belfast won a silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at the University of Athens, Greece (11th - 18th September 2004). Martin will also be awarded the €1,500 IBM Scholarship for winning the IOI Silver Medal at an awarding ceremony later this year.

The Irish IOI 2004 Team was selected from the finalists at the IBM/DCU Computer Programming Olympiad held in DCU in December 2003. The team followed an online training programme designed and implemented by Charlie Daly, a lecturer in school of computing, and Ciarán O Conaire, a postgraduate student. The students also attended an intensive residential course in the School of Computing, DCU prior to their departure to the Athens.