Access to Comp website

There has been a hardware failure on our internal DNS server.
To access the school website you can use its IP address:

http://147.252.224.87/website07/

Similarly to access staff websites you may use the format:

http://147.252.224.87/jbloggs

(example... http://147.252.224.87/bduggan)

Labs open on Saturday 18th December

The computer labs on the first floor of the Annex building are open on Saturday 18th December

Registration for Semester 2 2010/2011

Good evening.

If you have already selected and paid for the modules you are
taking in semester 2 please ignore this post.

If you haven't then you need to contact registrations as soon as
you can and arrange for the modules you wish to take to be added
to your record and make payment for same.
All payments must be made before the end of January.
You can find the numbers you need at
http://www.dit.ie/cgi-bin/phonesearch.pl?firstname=&surname=&department=registrations&location=kevin+st&phone=&submit=Search

You can access the timetable at
http://www.dit.ie/registration/studentclasstimetables/


Once you have completed your registration can you send me a
short email listing the modules you are registered on in Semester 2.

Many thanks in advance for your assistance with this.


Regards

Deirdre

Presentation on Tackling Exams

There will be a short 30 min presentation on general
tips on how to tackle your examinations on Wed 15th 2010 @ 18.00
in KA-G-026.

Deferral of Exams/Personal Circumstances

Folks

Before you sit your exams you need to make sure you are familiar
with the DIT general assessment regulations (available at http://www.dit.ie/services/academicregistrar/student-assessment-regulations/general/)
and the programme document (available online at http://library.dit.ie search for DT210)

If you cannot attend an exam and know in advance (e.g. work commitments) you
need to do the following:
1. Request a deferral form from the examinations office
2. Complete the deferral form and return with documentary evidence
to support your reason to myself or Brian MacNamee

All deferral requests are considered by the head of department and permitted/refused
at their discretion. It is VERY important that you submit some evidence with
your request.

If you are ill in the run up to an exam or on the day of an exam or any circumstances
happen which mean you cannot make the exam or feel you don't do well,
you need to submit a Personal Circumstances Form (available at
http://www.dit.ie/services/academicregistrar/student-assessment-regulations/general/)
and return it to the examinations office.
You must include a Professional Opinion Form with your circumstances.

Where you have submitted a personal circumstances it will be considered when the
examination board meets to consider your result. It will be treated as private and
discussed only with the programme mentor, programme chair, examinations officer
and chair of the examination board.



Deirdre

Probability & Statistical Inference Class (Tuesday 7th December)

The plan is for tonight's (Tuesday 7th December) Probability & Statistical Inference class to go ahead. The purpose of this class is to help students with their assignment, and no other material will be covered. If you have the assignment completed stay home by the fire!

To help with travel Aoife will get to the class in Aungier St. early, as close to 17:30 as she can, so as to help people get in and get out at a reasonable time.

Please check back to the blog later in case conditions worsen an plans have to change.

Semester 1 Exam Numbers + Timetables

I will be collecting your exam numbers and timetables from
the exams office this afternoon and will try to get them to you
over the next 3 days.

I will call into the various classes today if possible, tomorrow and Wednesday
or arrange for the relevant lecturer to take the letters for the people in
their class.

If your class does not go ahead and the college is open I will be in my office
@ 5.45 tonight Monday (KE-2-001 room 201 on the second floor)

If you can't make it in for class this week don't worry the exams office
will post whatever I haven't distributed by Thursday so you should get
it well in time for the exams start date.

Monday 6th - Data Mining

Due to the current weather conditions and curtailment of trains, buses, etc., tonights (Monday 6th Dec) Data Mining class is cancelled.

DIT opening times for next 3 days From Dec 2nd

The following arrangements have been agreed for opening times over the coming days, due to continuing adverse weather and the unpredictability of public transport:



* Thursday 02 December
o All DIT buildings will close at 4 pm this afternoon, and classes will be cancelled



* Friday 03 December
o All DIT buildings will open from 10 am to 4pm
o Classes cancelled BUT scheduled examinations will take place as previously notified



* Saturday 04 December
o All DIT buildings will remain closed
o DIT Open Day has been cancelled, with great regret, and will be rescheduled in early January



We regret the inconvenience caused but these decisions have been taken to avoid further uncertainty.

Please check www.dit.ie for information re opening on Monday Dec 6th

DIT closure Dec 1st

See message from public affairs

DIT BUILDINGS TO CLOSE FROM 4PM TODAY, WEDNESDAY 01 DECEMBER UNTIL NOON TOMORROW, THURSDAY 02 DECEMBER



Due to the worsening weather conditions and reduced public transport services, DIT will close from 4pm today, Wednesday 01 December, till noon tomorrow, Thursday 02 December. Students and colleagues are requested to check their email and the DIT website for further updates.



We regret this inconvenience and thank you for your cooperation.



Public Affairs Office

Wed Dec 1st 2010 - Problem Solving Class Cancelled

There will be no problem solving class this evening.
Damian will post homework on his website to be completed
for next week

Exam Timetable + Exam Number for Winter Exams

Your exam numbers and timetables will be distributed to you next week.
I will be in touch next Monday to let you know mechanism, times and locations.
If anyone can't make it in to receive their number and timetable - these
will be posted out to them

CLASS CANCELLED: Probability & Statistical Inference November 30th

Due to the extreme weather there will be no class for Probability & Statistical Inference this evening Tuesday Nov 30th.

Research Methods Class Tuesday 30th Nov 2010

Due to the extreme weather and the material due to be covered
tonight there will be no class for research methods this evening
Tuesday Nov 30th

Lab Opening Saturdays

Access will be provided to the computer labs from
Saturday December 4th.

Sabremetrics: Analytics in Sports

Seeing as we were talking about predicting player ratings in stats class on Tuesday night here is an interesting article about using analytics in sports.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/liverpool/8098829/Liverpool-owners-looking-to-use-baseball-principles-such-as-Moneyball-and-Sabermetrics.html

Free Accenture Analytics Event

Accenture in conjunction with The Irish Times are holding a business breakfast briefing focusing on “Using Analytics To Create Your Own Upturn” from 8am - 10am on 30th November 2010 in their offices in 1 Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2 (right next to the Grand Canal Theatre). Details are available here:

http://www.analyticsinstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=185&Itemid=189

This could be really interesting for folks to attend.

Provisional Semester 1 Exam Dates

For your information, at the moment the two exams for DT286 are scheduled as follows:

Module: Data Mining

Date: Monday, 10th January

Time: 13:00 - 15:00

Module: Probability & Statistical Inference

Date: Wednesday, 12th January

Time: 13:00 - 15:00

These are provisional dates and are subject to change. Following the DIT academic calendar (http://www.dit.ie/services/academic/calendar/) exams will all take place between the 10th and 21st of January.

Interesting application of analytics

Lingle – the result of a joint translational research project between members of the DIT Applied Intelligence Research Centre, the DIT School of Art, Design and Printing and the National Digital Research Centre (www.ndrc.ie) – launched in private beta this week at www.lingleonline.com.

Lingle is an online tool to facilitate English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teaching and learning. It saves users time and effort in sourcing and preparing real-world, relevant, appropriate and current course material based on authentic texts (e.g. newspaper articles or blog posts) and helps them exploit these texts for learning and teaching.

Lingle is an interesting use of analytics in that prediction models, built from a large collection of levelled documents, are used to assess the difficulty level of a document for a student.

Visit www.lingleonline.com now to request an invitation to join the beta.

SAS Server

It appears that the SAS server is now running correctly.

Brendan

Case Studies Session on BI

The MSc case studies session this Saturday (6th November) will be given by SAP on organisational BI. this is very relevant to all data analytics students and might be worth attending.

Details are available at: http://ditmsckm.blogspot.com/2010/11/case-studies-presentation-6-november.html

Analytics on the Wireless

There were a couple of radio shows in the last few days talking about interesting applications of analytics that are worth listening to. The first was Mariane Funicane at the weekend (24th October) who had a piece looking at Wikileaks and discussing the need for a new breed of analytics-savvy journalists. Available at (about an hour and a half in):

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/marianfinucane/

The second was on Newstalk's Off the Ball show on Wednesday the 27th talking about the use of analytics in (particularly American) sports. Available at (in part 3):

http://www.newstalk.ie/programmes/all/offtheball/listen-back/

Drupal Camp 20th - 21st November 2010

The next Drupal Ireland event is taking place on Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st November in Trinity College Dublin and will run from 9am to 5pm both days. Registration is free and you can now sign-up for this event at http://www.drupalcampireland.org.

Presentations in two tracks: White belt and black belt
The event will include presentations from experienced Drupal developers where people can learn more about Drupal, what it can do and how it can benefit both them, their careers and their organisation. There will be two tracks, so participants of all levels will be catered for.

- White Belt track: For newcomers and beginners.
- Black Belt track: For intermediates and experts.

About Drupal
Drupal is a powerful open source content management system which allows users to easily publish, manage and share a wide variety of content on the internet. There is a great demand for people who know this software and demand is growing. Drupal's many features and add-ons allow it to be used for a variety of website needs; including for marketing, internal communications, informational websites, and for social networking purposes. See http://www.drupal.org

About the Irish Drupal user group
This event is being organised by the Drupal Ireland user group - a volunteer membership group. The group is comprised of developers who use Drupal everyday; who contribute to Drupal core, documentation and maintain popular modules.

Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, this event is being held free of charge. Lunch is also being provided, and while registration is free, we would ask people to register before hand so we can cater accordingly.

More information on the event, including accommodation and car pooling, can be found at http://drupalcampireland.org

Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar

The second of this year's talks in the Dublin Computational
Linguistics Research Seminar DCLRS series will by given this week by
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
at Trinity College Dublin.

This year the DCLRS series is being organized by the Artificial
Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) in DIT, and is generously
supported by the CNGL and the DIT School of Computing.

The talk will take place in KE 308 in Kevin Street @ 16.00. Tea and biscuits
to be provided!




--- Speaker:
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis. Centre for Next Generation Localisation,
Trinity College Dublin.

--- Title:
Cross-Cultural Assessment of Automatically Generated Multimodal
Referring Expressions in a Virtual World.

--- Abstract
This talk presents a cross-cultural evaluation of an algorithm for
generating multimodal referring expressions to be produced by embodied
conversational agents in a virtual world. The algorithm employs a cost
function to implement general principles of
human motor control and cooperativity in dialogues that can be
parametrised so as to vary the precision of the pointing gestures and
the amount of linguistic information included in the referring
expressions. The study evaluated how native speakers of English and
Japanese perceived three different algorithmic outputs for multimodal
referring behaviour. Results show differences between English- and
Japanese-speaking subjects with respect to their preferences for types
of multimodal referring expressions. In the talk these differences are
related to matters of understandability, human-likeness and
culture-specific social practices. Methodological issues arising from
the translation and localisation of the materials used in the study as
well as its background and preparations are also addressed.

This research is supported by the Science Foundation Ireland (Grant
07/CE/I1142) as part of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
(www.cngl.ie) at Trinity College Dublin.

KEYWORDS: generating referring expressions, multimodality, virtual
worlds, realisation of referring expressions, dialogue, translation,
cross-cultural differences, social practices.


--- Time and Location:
KE308, Kevin Street @ 16.00, Friday 29th of October

Late Registration

You need to register and pay before Friday October 29th
to avoid a late fee.
If you have had problems with acceptance of an offer please
contact me (deirdre.lawless@dit.ie) asap
http://www.dit.ie/registration/

DIT Security Awareness Week

Security Awareness week is on next week from 18th to 22nd
Information Security awareness week is open to all students and staff and will provide an overview of why information security matters to all of us and what we need to do to protect ourselves from identity theft and other IT threats. Awareness seminars will take place in venues across DIT and will provide:

Simple tips on how to protect yourself at college and at home
Data protection - the legal implications for a data breach
Information on how staff can get their DIT laptops encrypted
Details on how obsolete DIT laptops can support development work in Malawi through Laptops4africa@dit.ie.

Further details available at
http://www.dit.ie/services/is/staff/itcompliance/infosecweek/

Probability & Statistical Inference Room

The Probability and Statistical Inference class will be in room 1-005 in Aungier St. (the same room as last week) for the remainder of the term.

Probability & Statistical Inference Class Change and Notes Available

Tuesday night's Probability & Statistical Inference class will take place in lab 1-005 in Aungier St. rather than in Kevin St. To get to 1-005 turn right when you come in the main Aungier St. entrance follow the corridor and take any of the staircases up to the first floor. 1-005 is at the end of the corridor on the right. If you get to DIT early, instead of turning right follow the left-hand corridor from the main entrance to Java City for nice coffee and students' union facilities in the basement.

Also the notes from last week's class are now available online at: http://www.comp.dit.ie/bmacnamee/pasi.htm. Notes will be here until everyone is set up on Webcourses.

A Follow Up on the Payment By Installments Option From DIT Registrations

While the new installments payment option from DIT registrations suits some people (often companies want to pay the whole bill for a programme) for most of you this won't make any difference. If you are paying for three modules this semester your total bill will not exceed the 2000 Euro threshold that is outlined in the previous post so the new option does not apply.

I hope you all had a first good week on the programme - including the trip to the pub for Damian's "class"!

Again I'll be in G028 next Tuesday between 18:00 and 18:30 if you need any questions answered.

Instalment Option for Part-time Students

In response to student needs, DIT has approved the following instalment option for PART-TIME students paying programme fees totalling €2,000 or more.


Conditions of the policy are as follows:

A two-phase instalment facility will be available to part-time students registering on a programme before the 31st October, where their tuition fee plus the capitation fee amounts to a fee of €2,000 or more.


· The instalment option is available on request only.

· The closing date for instalment requests is 31st October each year and no request will be considered after that date.

· Any student with a balance outstanding from a previous academic session cannot avail of this instalment option.



This policy comes into effect immediately.



Amount of Instalment



· 50% of the tuition fee and 100% of the capitation fee must be paid on registration.

· The first instalment must be a minimum of €1,750 euro.

· The second instalment must be paid no later than 31st January each year.



If a part-time programme commences at any other time of year (eg in January):

· The first instalment must be paid on registration and the second instalment no later than 30th April.

· Applications for the instalment facility for programmes with a January start will not be considered after 28th February and the same conditions as above applies.



Late payment penalties



If a student defaults on a payment the following late payment penalties apply;



· The first instalment payment must be made in full on registration. If the payment is not made the student will not be registered.

· If a student defaults on the second instalment, a late payment penalty of €180 will apply.

· If a student does not pay the second instalment, plus the late charge of €180, by 28th February they will be removed from the register (coded to PN on banner) and they should not attend classes, submit assessments or sit examinations.

· A re-registration fee of €220 will apply to those part-time students who wish to re-register on the programme and complete the year.


Part-time students wishing to avail of this facility should contact the Registration office in Kevin St for further details(01 402 4687)

Problem Solving class in pub

This week's class for "Problem Solving, Innovation
and Communcation" will be held in conjunction with
Nerdnite, Dublin and will be on at Messrs Maguire,
Burgh Quay, Dublin 2 at the regular time 6:30pm,
22nd September 2010.

Your lecturer, Damian Gordon, will be speaking
on "Hackers in movies"

http://dublin.nerdnite.com/

Another Room Change

There has been another change to the timetable. Data Mining will now be in room Annex 3-011 on the third floor of the Kevin St. Annex building. So the new timetable is as follows:

Monday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Data Mining | Annex 3 - 011 | Brendan Tierney

Tuesday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Probability & Statistics | Annex G - 028 | Aoife D'Arcy

Wednesday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Problem Solving Communications & Innovation | Annex 3 - 022 | Damian Gordan

Your Country, Your Call

It is very interesting to see that one of the two winning projects of the Your Country, Your Call competition (www.yourcountryyourcall.ie) - Cianán Clancy's the Data Island Strategy - is all about data analytics and making Ireland a centre of excellence. This is already starting to happen with many large companies locating their data analytics centres here, and the competition win is a great boost for the profile of data analytics in Ireland.

Well done to everyone involved.

Semester 1 Timetable

The timetable for semester 1 is as follows:

Monday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Data Mining | Annexe 1 - 017 | Brendan Tierney

Tuesday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Probability & Statistics | Annexe G - 028 | Aoife D'Arcy

Wednesday | 18:30 - 21:30 | Problem Solving Communications & Innovation | Annexe 3 - 022 | Damian Gordan

The two images above show a map of the Kevin St Annex building where all of the rooms are located.

See you Monday!

Thanks & Timetables

Hi folks,

Thank you attending induction last night and for being so enthusiastic. I think we have a very strong and very balanced cohort on the programme and that it is going to be a great year.

I made two mistakes last night when talking about timetables.

1) The Case Studies module which runs on Saturday afternoons is not running this semester, but rather in semester 2 from January - April. Apologies for the mix up. So, Saturdays are free for now!

2) Problem Solving Communications & Innovation is in room 3-022 in the Annexe in Kevin St. on Wednesday nights.

Again, if there is anything I can help you with please give me a shout.

Regards,

Brian.