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Item Solving mixed influence diagrams by reinforcement learning(Springer, 2024-02-15) Prestwich, Steven D.; Science Foundation Ireland; European Regional Development Fund; Horizon 2020While efficient optimisation methods exist for problems with special properties (linear, continuous, differentiable, unconstrained), real-world problems often involve inconvenient complications (constrained, discrete, multi-stage, multi-level, multi-objective). Each of these complications has spawned research areas in Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research, but few methods are available for hybrid problems. We describe a reinforcement learning-based solver for a broad class of discrete problems that we call Mixed Influence Diagrams, which may have multiple stages, multiple agents, multiple non-linear objectives, correlated chance variables, exogenous and endogenous uncertainty, constraints (hard, soft and chance) and partially observed variables. We apply the solver to problems taken from stochastic programming, chance-constrained programming, limited-memory influence diagrams, multi-level and multi-objective optimisation. We expect the approach to be useful on new hybrid problems for which no specialised solution methods exist.Item Patent documents: Facilitating visually impaired people in mathematical education through innovative solutions(International Journal on Engineering, Science and Technology (IJonEST), 2022) Shoaib, Muhammad; Pitt, Ian; Science Foundation IrelandA patent is a legal protection which gives an inventor the right to exclude others from performing a certain activity in the country of issuance. Innovations in form of patents are very beneficial for societies i.e., economic growth, reducing unemployment, increasing motivation and enhancing educational support. Visually impaired people are also part of society who faced several difficulties during access to educational material. Continual enrichment in technology has yielded a lot of innovative solutions for visually impaired people which have been patented. These solutions are in form of published articles, systems, applications and websites. Researchers can access journals, conferences, book chapters and technical reports easily but normally patents are unused sources of information in education. The main reason behind this is the complex structure of the patents which causes difficulty in reading. The proposed article aims to summarize the patent information in such a way that researchers and developers can easily access the information. Discuss some important patent offices from all over the world, along with their patent tools. A detailed analysis was conducted for patent documents that are of help to visually-impaired people learning mathematics.Item A mobile e-learning application for enhancement of basic mathematical skills in visually impaired children(Springer Nature Ltd., 2023-03-17) Shoaib, Muhammad; Khan, Shakeel; Fitzpatrick, Donal; Pitt, Ian; Science Foundation IrelandAlthough smartphones are equipped with accessibility functions, they still pose significant problems for visually impaired people. Sometimes these functions cannot fulfil the expectations of users. Early mobile devices had physical buttons and a keypad, and visually impaired users could navigate around the keypad using the tactile markers on the buttons. However, the lack of tactile markers makes it much more difficult to operate a touchscreen device. This paper describes an e-learning platform that is designed to improve the accessibility of smartphone applications for students who are visually impaired but have some useful vision. A User-Centered Design approach was used to develop an effective solution for visually impaired students. A study was conducted during the development of the described platform, and the results showed that our suggested design improves task completion time as compared to the initial version. Participants also expressed higher levels of satisfaction when using the improved design of this platform. The modified design was also assessed using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS), and the results indicate that it is quite reliable and rated well among visually impaired children. Furthermore, developers can use our suggested design guidelines such as clear navigation, color contrast, immediate feedback, icon arrangements, button and text size in the development of new applications.<Item Exploring unknown plant configurations under a multiple model adaptive control framework(Elsevier, 2023-11-22) Jesús Ares-Milián, Marlon; Provan, Gregory; Sohège, Yves; Quinones-Grueiro, Marcos; Science Foundation IrelandItem A narrowband ultrasonic ranging method for multiple moving sensor nodes(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2019) Ashhar, Karalikkadan; Noor-A-Rahim, Md.; Khyam, Mohammad Omar; Soh, Cheong Boon; Edge Hill University; Horizon 2020; Nanyang Technological UniversityAccurate ranging using narrow-band ultrasonic transducers in small-scale environments can be used for indoor localization, human motion capture, and robotic navigation. One of the main problems faced by the ultrasonic localization systems is the ranging error due to the Doppler shift. Existing methods for Doppler correction employ a bank of matched filters at the receiver end which is computationally intense and complex. On the other hand, enabling multiple access for the ultrasonic localization systems is a challenging task due to multiple access interference. We propose a method to measure the range between multiple ultrasonic mobile nodes and static anchors in which we track the Doppler velocity and correct the errors between the transmitted and the received signals due to the Doppler effect. We utilize range-Doppler coupling to estimate the Doppler shift and adjust the range values calculated by correlation. In our method, a unique set of two chirp signals are used for each transmitter to get one sample reading. The simulation results show high ranging accuracy and robustness using the proposed method as the Doppler velocity increases. A pendulum experiment was conducted to validate the method using narrowband ultrasonic sensors. The multiple access interference problem was tackled by orthogonal coding, the chirp signals and Doppler correction. An improvement in the ranging accuracy was observed over traditional methods using chirp signals without Doppler correction. © 2019 IEEE.