CORA
Cork Open Research Archive (CORA) is UCC’s Open Access institutional repository which enables UCC researchers to make their research outputs freely available and accessible.
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Recent Submissions
Body, emotions, and hormones: A systematic review of body dissatisfaction, emotion regulation, and puberty in adolescence
(2026-07-30) Muscolino, Isabella; Dockray, Samantha; Dempsey, Maria; Tomei, Eleonora
Objective: Body dissatisfaction often arises from a discrepancy between perceived and ideal body images, posing a risk for psychological issues like depression and eating pathologies, particularly during adolescence. Puberty's rapid physical changes may exacerbate the feeling of dissatisfaction, additionally pubertal changes also influence cognitive processes, such as emotion regulation. This study aimed to map the relationships of puberty, emotion regulation, and body dissatisfaction to advance a developmentally informed theory of body dissatisfaction and enhance possibilities for future intervention. Method: Searches for English language publications between 2000 and 2025 were conducted in five databases (Ebsco, Jstor, Proquest, Sciencedirect, Scopus). After removal of duplicate records, a total of 3658 studies were identified. Studies were included if they involved participants aged 6–18 and addressed associations of at least two of: emotion regulation, body dissatisfaction, and puberty/pubertal hormones. Following title and abstract screening, 259 studies were full text screened, resulting in 103 studies suitable for data extraction. Results: Findings indicate a relationship between body dissatisfaction, emotion regulation, and puberty. The strength of the correlation varies, partly influenced by pubertal stage. Positive body image predicted positive emotional responses to pubertal onset, while increased negative affect was associated with greater body dissatisfaction. If pubertal development is more advanced at an earlier age, negative effects on psychological well-being persist into adolescence. Conclusion: This review highlights the need for a developmentally informed theoretical framework to understand how puberty can pre-empt or exacerbate body image concerns, particularly in the presence of emotion dysregulation. This systematic review provides preliminary evidence supporting an interplay between puberty, emotion regulation, and body dissatisfaction in adolescence.
D2Sim: A computational simulator for nanopore sequencing based DNA data storage
(2026-07-23) Sankar, Subhasiny; Yixin, Wang; Noor-A-Rahim, Md; Gunawan, Erry; Guan, Yong Liang; Poh, Chueh Loo
DNA data storage has gained significant attention because of its high storage density and durability. However, errors during the storage and reading processes compromise data integrity, prompting research into error correction strategies. Researchers have explored physical (data copies) and logical redundancy (added redundancy in error-correcting codes) to mitigate errors. Evaluating these designs and reconstruction methods typically involves time-consuming and costly trials. To streamline this process, we designed a computational channel simulator, namely D2Sim, for Nanopore sequencing-based DNA data storage. This simulator mimics real experiments, generating data with certain redundancy and errors at the receiver. Integrated with DeepSimulator, D2Sim outputs signals closely resembling actual signals of Nanopore-based DNA storage. Comparative analysis reveals that the proposed simulator yields 16.7% to 88.7% lower sample difference deviations than signals from DeepSimulator alone. This cost-effective and time-efficient tool facilitates the assessment of physical and logical redundancy for data reconstruction in DNA data storage without the need for real-time experiments.
Lean formalization of generalization error bound by Rademacher complexity and Dudley’s entropy integral
(Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing, 2026-07-16) Sonoda, Sho; Kasaura, Kazumi; Mizuno, Yuma; Tsukamoto, Kei; Onda, Naoto; Komendantskaya, Ekaterina; Komendantskaya, Ekaterina; Nipkow, Tobias
Understanding and certifying the generalization performance of machine learning algorithms - i.e. obtaining theoretical estimates of the test error from the training error - is a central theme of statistical learning theory. Among the many complexity measures used to derive such guarantees, Rademacher complexity yields sharp, data-dependent bounds that apply well beyond classical VC-dimension theory. In this study, we formalize the generalization error bound by Rademacher complexity in Lean 4, building on measure-theoretic probability theory available in the Mathlib library. Our development provides a mechanically-checked pipeline from the definitions of empirical and expected Rademacher complexity, through a formal symmetrization argument and a bounded-differences analysis, to high-probability uniform deviation bounds via a formally proved McDiarmid inequality. A key technical contribution is a reusable mechanism for lifting results from countable hypothesis classes (where measurability of suprema is straightforward in Mathlib) to separable topological index sets via a reduction to a countable dense subset. As worked applications of the abstract theorem, we mechanize standard empirical Rademacher bounds for linear predictors under ℓ2 and ℓ1 regularizations, and we also formalize a Dudley-type entropy integral bound based on covering numbers and a chaining construction.
Oral proficiency retention of L2 Chinese learners following study abroad
(2026-07-16) Guo, Rongrong; Chen, Junming
Abstract – This study examines L2 Chinese learners’ oral retention during the formal instruction at home (AH) context after a period of study abroad (SA). Specifically, it investigates oral developments of L2 Chinese learners in a six-month AH context following their return from ten-month SA. Participants were ten English-speaking undergraduate L2 Chinese learners at an Irish university. Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF) measures were employed to assess learners’ oral development, with seven metrics providing an in-depth performance evaluation. Data were collected at three time points: pre-SA (T1), post-SA (T2), and six months after returning to AH (T3). Analyses focused specifically on the T2–T3 period to examine the long-term retention of oral proficiency gains following SA. Results showed lexical diversity and syntactic subordination retention, while erosion was observed in fluency (e.g., increased silent pauses) and lexical sophistication. Such findings suggest that learners in the AH context tend to concentrate on learning vocabulary (diversity) and syntactic complexity at the expense of fluency, accuracy (Juan-Garau & Pérez-Vidal, 2007) and lexical sophistication.
Bacteriophage in Granular Waves
(xCoAx Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, 2026-07-09) Roddy, Stephen; Verdicchio, Mario; Ribas, Luísa; Rangel, André; Carvalhais, Miguel
Bacteriophage in Granular Waves is a musical work and performance that adopts data-driven composition methods, generative systems and sonification techniques to produce a musical work from a synthetic virology dataset. It has emerged from a larger collaboration exploring creative and artistic strategies for the visualization and sonification of virology data. The system employs agent-based modelling to draw samples from the dataset and uses waveshaping and granular synthesis methods to map these data to musical parameters. The end results is a performance that is always in flux where simple waveforms are sliced into tiny sections and reconfigured into texturally rich tapestries that interweave through one another shifting and unfurling in response to the virological parameters represented in the data.