Contacts:
Alan Smeaton,
Aaron Quigley,

WWW:
http://www.odcsss.ie/

DUBLIN, IRELAND, APRIL 20, 2006. While some undergraduates head for summer vacations, 19 undergraduate students from France, the United States, and Ireland will be participating in a twelve-week summer research program beginning June 6th.

"Many undergraduates have lots of energy to devote to projects beyond their core studies," says Aaron Quigley, college lecturer at University College Dublin (UCD) and co-director of Odysseus, the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School (ODCSSS) with Alan Smeaton, director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing and Professor at Dublin City University (DCU).

"The program helps focus this energy into something that will help expand their horizons and possibly change our society," Quigley says.

Smeaton says, "Students involved in this summer's program will be really challenged by the individual projects on which they work, as well as by the efforts we will all make to integrate and combine those projects. In fact, students will probably learn just as much in the crossover among the projects."

The 19 ODCSSS interns are divided into four teams, each working in one of four thematic areas: speech and language processing, imaging and visualization, pervasive computing, and software engineering.

Projects in the ODCSSS program cover everything from how to integrate speech recognition and speech synthesis engines with machine translation systems; to finding the trade-off between the smallest file size possible while maintaining a certain level of integrity in streaming content for hand-held devices; to integrating chemical and biometric sensors into wearable clothing; to building privacy enhancing identity management systems.

Each intern works with graduate students, post-docs and a supervising expert and is expected to not only deliver on an individual project but also contribute to the broader research community to which they are assigned.

This is the first year for the ODCSSS program, which is being funded by UCD and DCU and the Adaptive Information Cluster, a collaboration among researchers at those universities. AIC research focuses on developing information technology that automatically evolves to meet the diverse needs of users, devices, and content in changing contexts, for example, in the integration of cell phones, audio players, digital cameras and other hand-held devices or in the changing conditions found in transportation, security, entertainment, and healthcare.

The ODCSSS summer school, which takes counsel from its namesake Odysseus, helps find solutions by bringing new, growing talent to the fore.

"Students need a guide through this process. And, what we hope they will learn through the summer program is that a research career is their opportunity to become a guide for others, whether they become a scientist, academic, or a business leader," Quigley says.

"The summer school makes use of online tools such as video conferencing, weblogs, and Wikis to bridge the distance between DCU and UCD, situated on opposite sides of Dublin," says Quigley.

Several program events also bring the students together throughout the summer.

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