Summit aims high

Science Foundation Ireland celebrated its 10thbirthday in futuristic style with some mind-boggling presentations

WHY DOES it unsettle us when characters in computer games are too lifelike?

Will we one day drive cars that talk to each other to reduce traffic congestion? And how can we better tell when a baby is having have growth problems in the womb?

These were some of the questions being asked at Science Foundation Ireland’s annual summit in Athlone earlier this month. The funding agency, which celebrates its 10th birthday this year, put the emphasis on mining minds as a resource in Ireland over the next decade. Thus the presentations strove to highlight the expanse of talent on offer.

One of the most eye-catching looked at understanding how we interpret computerised ‘people’ or avatars in films, games and other applications.

“What we care about is creating believable cities where you can see the sights and hear the sounds,” said Carol O’Sullivan, professor of visual computing at Trinity College Dublin. “And we want to populate those cities with crowds that look realistic, that are believable humans.”

This was not as easy as it sounded, she explained, because of the subtleties involved in how our brains perceived graphic characters. The upper body was particularly important. Synchrony between the sound of an individual’s voice and their body movement was also critical, she said, and mismatching them could lose the audience. But – bizarrely – getting it too right might lead to the “uncanny valley” of a virtual character becoming repulsive or weird to the viewer.

Trinity research also suggests that realistic-looking characters are perceived to be less trustworthy than more cartoonish renderings.

“We have to be careful about the characters we create,” Prof O’Sullivan said. “If we want to use avatars in applications like e-commerce or in training people to use technology, we need to get it right in terms of the appeal.”

The research is also feeding into Metropolis, a project to create a virtual model of Dublin: “We want realistic rendering, so that people don’t walk into each other or through buildings,” said Prof O’Sullivan, though she noted there was still some work needed on getting the virtual cars to behave.

Meanwhile in the less virtual world, a ‘co-ordinated driving’ approach could help drivers in real cars to get from A to B in good time, explained Dr Vinny Cahill from Trinity and Lero.

“Traffic congestion is a serious problem,” he said, explaining that as well as creating frustration in road users, the unpredictability of journey times could also have an impact on industry supply chains. “Just-in-time production and distribution systems require reliable transportation times.”

Cahill outlined a model that assigned vehicles to individual ‘slots’ on the road and used real-time communication between cars to manage congestion and predict journey times.

It’s akin to taking cruise control to a higher, more interconnected level: “We are doing a collaborative version of cruise control, co-ordinating it between cars,” he said. “Although we probably shouldn’t try to tell you where to drive all the time.”

Being assigned slots on motorways is probably about as far away as you can get from what Neanderthals and early modern humans experienced. But aspects of their lifestyle and genetics were also teased out at the conference, along with projects to track carbon dioxide levels in the ocean, to seek distant planets with linked up telescopes, to monitor how the appliances in your home consume electricity in real time, to develop materials that help bone to heal and to imprint surfaces with tiny patterns that could support faster electronics.

Meanwhile Prof Jean-Pierre Colinge from Tyndall National Institute scooped the award for SFI researcher of the year for developing a junctionless transistor that could potentially overcome barriers to developing smaller, faster and more energy efficient electronics.

Tiny babies also got a look-in through an international project called Scope which aimed to reliably predict when a foetus was experiencing growth restriction in the womb.

The condition affects 5 to 10 per cent of first-time pregnancies in Ireland, according Louise Kenny, professor of obstetrics at University College Cork and a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Cork University Maternity Hospital. Growth restriction can result in stillbirth, or time in neonatal intensive care. There may be long-term consequences for the baby, with increased risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life.

“Current practices are failing to detect these babies,” said Prof Kenny. “Only about 16 per cent are detected in the uterus.”

The Scope study is looking for biochemical markers in the mother’s blood that can flag a potential issue. So far it has identified 19 biochemicals of interest and is looking to study them in blood samples from pregnant women.

The projects presented at the summit highlight the excellence of the research being funded, according to outgoing Director-General of SFI Prof Frank Gannon, who takes up a position in Australia in January.

Claire O’Connell co-presented a workshop on media communications at the SFI summit