National College of Ireland is a partner for the NEWTON Project which aims to develop, integrate and disseminate innovative technology-enhanced learning (TEL) methods and tools, to create new or inter-connect existing state-of-the-art teaching labs and to build a pan-European learning network platform that supports fast dissemination of learning content to a wide audience in a ubiquitous manner.

IRCSET Embark Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme. This project investigated means of providing learners with educational content that best suits their profile and access network while taking into account user budget constraints. The project administrator was Andreea Molnar, PHD in Technology Enhanced Learning.

The project administrator was David Joyce, PHD in Technology Enhanced Learning.

This project aimed to design, test and validate adaptive strategies for assisting mobile learners in situations were their learning outcome is impacted by low battery conditions. The project administrator was  Arghir-Nicolae Moldovan, Masters in Technology Enhanced Learning.

The aim of the COST Initiative is to reduce the fragmentation in European research investments and opening the European Research Area to cooperation worldwide.  This network will collaborate on research and share good practice in the areas of HCI, usability and user experience.  Funded through the ESF COST Initiative. The project administrator was Dr. Stephan Weiblzahl, Lecturer, School of Computing.

This research looked at how motivation in gaming based e-learning can be measured, identifying factors that increase motivation with a focus on adaptive strategies for personalisation-based motivation in gaming based e-learning. The project administrator was Ioana Ghergulescu, Masters in Technology Enhanced Learning.

The design and development of a Problem Based Learning Induction resource to equip students with the skills necessary for successful participation in any Problem Based Learning Module. The project administrator was Dr Orla Lahart., Lecturer School of Computing

Improving Students' Learning Experience of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE's) in Moodle. The project administrators were Dr Stephan Weiblzahl and Abi Reynolds.

“Parallel Processing of Secure Machine Learning Models in Cloud Environments”

From a research and innovation programme perspective, the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship constitutes a national mechanism designed to attract, retain, and empower excellent early-career researchers through competitive, investigator-led funding. Funded by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and administered by Research Ireland, the programme enables fellows to pursue independent research agendas within Irish host institutions, while fostering international collaboration and institutional capacity building. In this context, the fellowship titled “Parallel Processing of Secure Machine Learning Models based on the Residue Number Systems in Cloud environments” was led by Dr Jorge Mario Cortes-Mendoza, under the academic mentorship of Prof Horacio González-Vélez at the Cloud Competency Centre, and successfully concluded on 15 October 2025.
From an economic and systemic perspective, the fellowship demonstrates how sustained public investment in postdoctoral research can generate high-value scientific outputs while strengthening international research networks. The project integrated advanced topics in secure machine learning, high-performance computing, and cloud systems, resulting in two peer-reviewed journal articles and three international conference publications. These outputs were produced in collaboration with leading academic partners, including the CICESE research center in Mexico, the Cracow University of Technology in Poland, the North-Caucasus Federal University in Russia, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Beyond publications, the fellowship facilitated advanced skills acquisition through participation in specialised summer schools on High Performance Computing and Federated Learning in Italy and Spain, reinforcing the transfer of cutting-edge knowledge across borders.
Imagine a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of secure computation, distributed systems, and machine learning—fields that underpin modern data-driven infrastructures but demand both theoretical depth and experimental scalability. Traditionally, such a researcher might publish isolated results while facing fragmented funding, limited teaching opportunities, and constrained international exposure. Yet the methods, models, and software artefacts developed in this domain are as critical as the final scientific conclusions themselves. Without structured support, these contributions risk remaining under-exploited, despite their relevance for secure cloud computing and trustworthy AI systems.
Here lies the distinctive value of this fellowship: by combining research autonomy, international collaboration, and academic integration, it enabled the fellow to deliver measurable and lasting impact. In addition to high-quality publications, the fellowship supported extensive academic service and capacity building, including reviewing activities for five international conferences and six peer-reviewed journals, supervision of 23 master’s theses, and delivery of nine academic courses. This comprehensive portfolio illustrates how the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship not only advances state-of-the-art research in secure machine learning and cloud environments, but also cultivates the next generation of research leaders capable of contributing to global scientific and educational ecosystems beyond the lifetime of the project itself.

From a business perspective, such a marketplace puts together data producers and data consumers to foster the delivery of cross-cutting solutions based on an open innovation model. The incentive for researchers and research organisations is twofold: they get the chance to accept who gets to use their own data and under what terms—an innovation leveraging distributed ledger technologies—and they get paid while sharing their data in a pay-per-access fashion. 

From an economic perspective, the marketplace integrates tools for smart semantic discovery of relevant data, while promoting an Open Source culture where researchers do not need to pay for re-executing experiments if redundant. Thus, research funding has a chance to propel the advance of technology on the shoulders of already-existing findings. 

Imagine a scientist producing state-of-the-art data-intensive (Big Data) experimental findings with significant global impact. Traditionally, she/he would publish a paper summarising the results. However, the datasets and tools behind this experiment are equally, if not more, important that the sole description of such results and the conclusions reached. One could argue about the importance of the use of an open access repository to share data to increase dataset reusability. However, there is not yet a clear open mechanism to trace how data is further used by others and, possibly, monetise their use.

 Here lies the novelty of our project: we will nurture a traceable open innovation model by deploying public distributed ledgers for controlling access rights to data, with data models able to grant access according to policies completely kept under the control of the data owner/producer.

Funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 programme, the 4-year Action fostered a novel, coordinated Big Data endeavour supported by High Performance Computing from 2015 to 2019. It will support information exchange, synergy, and coordination of activities among leading European research groups and top global partner institutions, and promote European software industry competitiveness.

Horacio González-Vélez and Adriana Chis were vice-chair and management committee representative respectively. Selected results can be found through the open access Springer LNCS 11400 book. 

Funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon2020 programme, the Action aimed to improve knowledge extraction from non-perfect and non-standard datasets via novel methods and tools in computing, statistics, machine learning, and mathematics. Simon Caton was the institutional representative to the Action's management committee. 

ParaPhrase project produced parallel software that was easy to write using multicore hardware more effectively with the goal of speeding up processing by at least one order of magnitude over sequential execution on real near-term multicore architectures for the use cases and systems that will be considered in the project. 

ParaPhrase built on a (multi-level) model of parallelism, where implementations of parallel programs are expressed in terms of interacting components. By expressing parallelism in terms of high-level parallel patterns that have alternative parallel implementations, we will be able to redeploy/refactor parallel components to dynamically match the available hardware resources. Horacio González-Vélez was the principal investigator at NCI.

TrainRDM aims to empower the education and skills dimension of Open Science and Open Data through exploring innovative mechanisms and tools.

Funder: EC Erasmus+

SPuMoNI will design data quality assessment models that account for industry regulations, and analyze data behavior patterns over time to identify outliers, i.e.; data that violates compliance. This semi-autonomous data quality control decision support system will more efficiently ensure best pharmaceutical manufacturing practice.

The project is led by Adriana Chis who jointly presented SPuMoNI at the CHIST-ERA Projects Seminar with Horacio González-Vélez, which took place in Bucharest this April 2019 as part of the EU Presidency 2019 activities. CHIST-ERA is a programme for European Coordinated Research on Long-term Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies, supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies programme. In Ireland, CHIST-ERA is managed by the Irish Research Council.

Funded by the EU under the AAL initiative, vINCI is developing an integrated and validated evidence-based IoT framework to deliver non-intrusive monitoring and support for older adults to augment professional health care giving. It integrates proven open-data analytics with innovative user-driven IoT devices in four standardized kits. Horacio González-Vélez serves as honorary scientific advisor. vINCI aims to assist caregivers and provide smart care for older adults at out-patients clinics and outdoors.

This Action provided the integration to foster a novel, coordinated Big Data endeavor supported by HPC. It will strongly support information exchange, synergy and coordination of activities among leading European research groups and top global partner institutions, and will promote European software industry competitiveness. 

Open Science opens up new ways in which research/education/innovation are undertaken, archived and curated, and disseminated across the globe. Open Science is about greater efficiency and productivity, more transparency, and a better response to interdisciplinary research needs. 

Open Science (OS) requires a cultural change in academic institutions, including the acquisition of new knowledge and skills in fields like open access publishing and research data sharing. 

Open Science and Research Data Management Innovative and Distributed Training Programme aims to empower the Education and Skills dimension of Open Science through exploring innovative mechanisms and tools to provide the skills training and Research Data Management (RDM) good practices.

Parallel computing platforms have revolutionised the hardware landscape by providing high-performance, low-energy, and specialized (viz. heterogeneous) processing capabilities to a variety of application domains, including mobile, embedded, data-centre and high-performance computing. However, to leverage their potential, system designers must strike a difficult balance in the apportionment of resources to the application components, striving to avoid under- or over-provisions against worst-case utilisation profiles. 

The entanglement of hardware components in the emerging platforms and the complex behaviour of parallel applications raise conflicting resource requirements, more so in smart, (self-)adaptive and autonomous systems. This scenario presents the hard challenge of understanding and controlling, statically and dynamically, the trade-offs in the usage of system resources, (time, space, energy, and data), also from the perspective of the development and maintenance efforts. 

Making resource-usage trade-offs at specification, design, implementation, and run time requires profound awareness of the local and global impact caused by parallel threads of applications on individual resources. Such awareness is crucial for academic researchers and industrial practitioners across all European and COST member countries, and, therefore, a strategic priority. 

Reaching this goal requires acting at two levels: (1) networking otherwise fragmented research efforts towards more holistic views of the problem and the solution; (2) leveraging appropriate educational and technology assets to improve the understanding and management of resources by the academia and industry of underperforming economies, in order to promote cooperation inside Europe and achieve economical and societal benefits.

The research examined the degree to which segregation exists in the investment management sub sector of the financial services industry in Ireland and the underlying reasons for these patterns.  It compared and analysed the experiences of men and women who work, or have worked, in the sector in order to identify the enablers and barriers they encountered in recruitment, progression and retention. The project administrator was Corina Sheerin, Lecturer School of Business.

Employee fairness judgements in respect of termination of employment: A Longitudinal Study. The research aimed to explore the factors which impact upon an employee's fairness perception in relation to the termination of employment in an Irish context. The project administrator was Dr Colette Darcy, Lecturer School of Business.

Development of an Adaptive Tutoring System for a Computing & Business Mathematics Module as a way to facilitate self-directed learning through the use of the On-Line Virtual Learning Environment Moodle. The project administrators were Francis Sheridan, Computer Support Tutor and Jonathan Lambert, Maths Support Tutor.

KESP is a HETAC accredited Programme designed to deliver the core competencies and business skills needed for the Knowledge Economy. It is a special purpose award at level 6 of the Framework and delivered using an innovative blended learning model. KESP was funded by FAS and delivered to just under 400 work based learners in 2007-2009.

Know IT is a beginners computer course. Know IT encourages learners to take their first steps in learning about computers and concentrates on everyday practical tasks such as writing an email, exploring the internet or simple word processing. Know IT is an e-learning course delivered via CD and is a FETAC accredited course at level 3. Know IT was funded by FAS and delivered to over 1000 learners during the period 2006-2009.  

The aim of the Dlips project was to look at digital literacy in the context of the Irish primary education sector. Our objective was to investigate the use and impact of digital media practices in a sample of 4 DEIS Primary Schools. This project was funded by the Department of Education and Science and was carried in partnership with the Digital Hub Development Agency, the Education Research Centre and the University of Glasgow.

National College of Ireland secured funding from the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) to undertake a feasibility study into the current use of technology in schools in the Docklands area. Two areas of need in particular were highlighted: technical support and using technologies for learning. Researchers worked with 26 schools in the Docklands area over the period December 2007- May 2008 and produced a report with recommendations for this area. 

The goal of this European project is to develop a new technology training course to further educate teachers, parents and professionals working in the area of inclusive education. This new project has arose out of findings from an older LdV Project EDU RoboBraille (2011-2013), where partners discovered the need to develop and describe a practical hands-on training course aimed at improving the skills of teachers, parents and alternate media producers supporting people with visual and reading impairments. The consortium is made up of 8 partners from Denmark, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and Ireland. Contact Dr. Michael Goldrick Irish Lead Researcher.