The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is bringing together fifteen search engine experts to Dublin City University in September for a Summer School an Information Retrieval. The fifteen experts are from Research Institutes and Universities throughout Europe, and includes a previous head of research at Google as well as those regarded as being the founding fathers of information retrieval.

ESSIR 2005, the European Summer School on Information Retrieval is a bi-annual event, which has previously been hosted in the UK, Italy and most recently France in 2003. One hundred graduate and post-doctoral students from all over Europe and beyond will attend the week-long Summer school to hear the experts give lectures on topics such as Web Search Engines, Multimedia Search, and Personalising Search Engines. The target audience of the Summer School are PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and academic and industrial researchers.

The ESSIR 2005 Summer school will run from 5-9 September 2005 in Dublin City University. It is being organised and hosted by the Centre for Digital Video Processing, part of the Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University.

Further information on ESSIR is available at http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/ESSIR2005

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Professor Russell C. Eberhart from Purdue University, Indianapolis visited DCU on Wednesday July 20th to give a talk on "Swarm Intelligence: Concepts to Applications" under the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Programme.

Swarm intelligence is a fascinating artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised systems. Examples abound in the animal world, where the collective behaviour of ants, bees and fish (unsophisticated agents) with their environment causes coherent global patterns to emerge.

Swarm intelligence offers researchers and scientists a tool for exploring collective or distributed problem solving. Its ability to solve these problems leads to various practical real world applications, such as networking, games, robotics, and traffic routing, and potentially even simulating the global economy. Professor Eberhart explained to a packed seminar room how the U. S. Marine Corps has used swarm intelligence for logistics scheduling, and how it has also been used for medical analysis/diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.

Following a meeting with Professor Michael Ryan, Professor Heather Ruskin and Ray Walshe of the School of Computing, Professor Eberhart commented that, "Our mutual discussions of extended analog computing lead me to believe that collaboration between Indiana University, the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indianapolis, and Dublin City University should be pursued. This is an exciting time for research in particle swarm optimization, also, and cooperation in this area is welcome."

After a tour of the Biocomputation Resarch Laboratory, and discussions with researchers involved, Professor Eberhart added that, "I enjoyed meeting the students, and learning about their areas of research.šIt seems that there may be some possible applications of swarm intelligence to some of the areas, such as clustering and traffic analysis."

Professor Eberhart is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.šHe holds four United States patents.šHe thanked the IEEE for facilitating his visit through the Distinguished Lecturer Programme, by invitation from Invitation the IEEE UKRI Computational Intelligence Chapter, and concluded "It was my first visit to Ireland; I hope to return soon."

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Professor Michael Ryan, Head of the School of Computing at DCU, has recently been elected Distinguished Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. The prestigious title was awarded in recognition of Professor Ryan's enormous and continuing contribution to the software industry in Ireland, and in honour of his distinguished service with the Society.

Professor Ryan joined the School of Computing at Dublin City University (then the National Institute for Higher Education Dublin) on its foundation in 1980, and was instrumental in establishing the School's B.Sc. in Computer Applications as Ireland's leading undergraduate computing qualification. He has been Head of the School of Computing on two previous occasions: from 1981 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1999, taking up the position again in 2005.

The Distinguished Fellow award was presented to Professor Ryan at the Irish Computer Society's Summer Member's Evening, held at ICS headquarters on June 28th 2005.

On June 14th and 21st, over 40 students from local secondary schools attended speech technology workshops in the School of Computing, as part of DCU's Junior Summer Science Camp. The two three-hour-long workshops introduced students to automatic speech recognition and other aspects speech technology, and aimed to highlight their wide applicability. Students built simple dialogue systems that allow users to interact with computers using speech. They also learnt how to describe spoken words in terms of component sounds, in a similar way to using letters to spell written words. This knowledge was then used to instruct the computer how to produce synthetic speech. The fun, interactive nature of the workshops proved popular with students.

The workshops were offered as part of DCU's Junior Summer Science Camp, two weeklong camps that expose students to a variety of science-related topics, including biotechnology, sports science, electronic engineering, and physics. For further details, download a copy of the Junior Science Camp brochure (pdf).

The first workshop on Pairings in Cryptography will take place in Dublin City University.

The workshop "Pairings in Cryptography" is funded by the European Commissions's sixth framework programme (FP6) ECRYPT project. The workshop will give an opportunity for active researchers to share recent results and generate new ideas in this vibrant area of cryptography/computational number theory. Our hope is that the workshop will also be attractive to those researchers who are starting to work in this area and who would like to learn more about new developments and to discuss their ideas with experts.

The goal of the workshop is to promote collaboration among European researchers.

The workshop will feature invited talks from leading researchers in the field.
These include:

• Paulo Barreto (University of São Paulo)
• Xavier Boyen (Voltage Security)
• Yevgeniy Dodis (NYU)
• Florian Hess (TU Berlin)
• Tanja Lange (Technical University of Denmark)

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