role: Students
Brian Collins
PhD Researcher
A graduate with an eclectic set of educational and employment experience. Originally studied Mechanical Engineering (with sustainability) for my bachelors. Followed by a MSc in an Applied Maths & Physics, and diploma data analysis & science.
Coupled with my graduate employment experience initially in the IT sector, follow by Biomed & Energy sector has given me interest in research in applying data science to real world problems. My extra-curricular interesting in regenerative medicine inspired me in this case, to my current Ph.D. -applying machine learning to tissue engineering.
Supervisors: Dr. Tanya Levingstone & Dr. Malika Bendechache
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Dermot Sheridan
PhD Researcher
Dermot Sheridan is a second-year PhD student in the School of Computing , Dublin City University , where he is supervised by Prof. Mark Roantree l His research is in the field of application of machine learning for athlete monitoring and performance prediction in team sports which is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that is concerned with tools and techniques to help investigate sports performance. Dermot holds an MSc. of Science, where his thesis was focused on Fatigue and Recovery in Gaelic Football. Prior to joining the CRT-AI funded PhD programme, Dermot worked as a sport scientist and performance coach with elite Gaelic football in Ireland. In his spare time Dermot enjoys being active and hanging out with friends.
Supervisor: Prof. Mark Roantree
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Zohreh Khosrobeigi
PhD Researcher
She is a second-year PhD scholar in the Research Centre for Computing and Language Studies at the school of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, where I am supervised by Assistant Professor Carl Vogel. Her research is in the field of Human to Human Interaction which is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence in Video and Speech processing that is concerned with tools and techniques to Analyse Gestures in the Conversation to Recognize Gestures are a part of the conversation and help a better understanding. She is a Teacher Assistant at Prolog Programming and Artificial Intelligence modules. She holds an MSc. In Multimedia, where her thesis was focused on Persian OCR. In his/her spare time, Zohreh enjoys cycling, dancing, and socializing with her friends. You can also reach Her through her academic page.
Supervisors: Professor Carl Vogel
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Cathy Roche
PhD Researcher
Cathy is a second-year Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, where she is supervised by Professor Dave Lewis.
Her research is in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Ethics, where she is looking at diversity and inclusion in the emerging AI standardisation and ethical principles. Cathy holds a MSc in Computing from Technological University Dublin (TUD) where her thesis focused on using Machine Learning to identify the determinants of employee engagement. She also holds a MA in International Development from Dublin City University (DCU) and a postgraduate degree in Education from Trinity College Dublin.
Prior to joining the CRT-AI funded Ph.D. programme, Cathy worked as a Data Scientist in the financial sector, having had previous roles with Irish Aid, Young Social Innovators and Amnesty International Ireland. In her spare time, Cathy enjoys reading, cooking and baking.
Supervisors: Dr. Dave Lewis & Dr. PJ Wall
PROJECTS
Optimisation and Constraint Programming 2
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PUBLICATIONS
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Jasmina Gajcin
PhD Researcher
Jasmina is a second-year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, where she is supervised by Professor Ivana Dusparic. Her research is mainly in the field of reinforcement learning, which is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence, concerned with developing smart autonomous agents.
She is in particular interested in researching methods for explaining behavior of agents. Prior to joining CRT-AI program, Jasmina obtained MSc. degree in computer science at University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Her MSc. thesis was focused on increasing robustness of neural networks for classifying damaged images. In her free time Jasmina is a passionate chess player.
Supervisors: Ivana Dusparic
PUBLICATIONS
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Fatemeh Amerehi
PhD Researcher
Fatemeh is a Ph.D. researcher in Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick. Her research interests lie in AI safety, deep generative models, and mathematical programming, ranging from theory to design to implementation. Her work investigates the robustness and out-of-distribution generalization of deep neural networks, while also exploring the capabilities and vulnerabilities of deep generative models, particularly GANs and diffusion models. In addition, she works on optimization problems related to dynamic ridesharing and transportation systems.
Publications:
Defending Against Frequency-Based Attacks with Diffusion Models, Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) Workshops, 2025, pp. 3523-3533 https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2025W/AdvML/html/Amerehi_Defending_Against_Frequency-Based_Attacks_with_Diffusion_Models_CVPRW_2025_paper.html
Label Augmentation for Neural Networks Robustness, Proceedings of The 3rd Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents, PMLR 274:620-640, 2025 https://proceedings.mlr.press/v274/amerehi25a.html
Narrowing Class-Wise Robustness Gaps in Adversarial Training, ICLR 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models in the Wild https://openreview.net/forum?id=23zngyObBI
VF-Net: Robustness Via Understanding Distortions and Transformations, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10647346
Ridesharing: Harnessing Role Flexibility and HOV Integration, Proceedings of the 10th TRA Conference 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05077
Ridesharing: The Impact of Traffic Restrictions and Role Flexibility, 2023 IEEE 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10422162
PROJECTS
Optimisation and Constraint Programming 2
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OTHER TEAM MEMBERS
Yumnah Hasan
PhD Researcher
My research expertise is in Computer vision and Deep Learning. I did my masters thesis on “Robust detection and Classification of vehicles in urban complex environment”. For this project our team built our own dataset and we implemented different detection and classification techniques on it. I got my first publication on my thesis topic. I presented my research paper in the Future technologies Conference which was held in San Francisco, USA. Then I started working on other two projects which are rice classification and Fingerprint recognition with teammates. We did 2 more publications on each topic and both were presented in an international conference. I am very interested in working on biomedical images in which these techniques can be used. Fortunately, I got a chance to select my research topic like that. I will be doing research on multiparametric identification and segmentation of breast cancer using DNN and Grammatical Evolution.
Supervisor: Professor Conor Ryan
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Halima Boutouil
PhD Researcher
I am Ph.D student at DCU Centre for Medical Engineering Research at School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering DCU, where I am supervised by Dr. Tanya Levingstone, Dr. Suzanne Little and Prof. Nicholas Dunne. My research falls in the field of tissue engineering, which refers to the practice of combining scaffolds, cells, and biologically active molecules into functional tissues.
During my PhD I aim to develop a novel Artificial Intelligence algorithm to optimise printing parameters for different bioinks.
I hold a Bachelor’s in Engineering, I joined Future Neuro Center at RCSI Dublin as a Visiting Scientist, where I analysed EEG data and built an interface for signal processing and data visualization.
Before joining the CRT-AI funded PhD program, I worked as a research assistant in the same group at RCSI, where we developed a machine learning algorithm for the detection of spontaneous seizures in EEG in multiple experimental mouse models of epilepsy.
Supervisors: Dr. Tanya Levingstone, Dr. Suzanne Little and Prof. Nicholas Dunne.
PUBLICATIONS
OTHER TEAM MEMBERS
Eric Ferreira dos Santos
PhD Researcher
Eric’s main interests include data, technology, science overall and machine learning, mainly in the model explanation. He has several years’ experience working with data engineering, processing and analysis, and leading a data and development team. Eric’s PhD research focuses on the explainable aspect of deep learning techniques applied to image classification to support experts verifying machine-made decisions where ML or DL techniques are utilised and where catching potential false positives is essential. Eric held the MSc in Information Systems from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Brazil. The research developed a framework to identify bot messages characteristics on Twitter and explains the concepts humanly to ordinary users. The paper from this research was published at the FATES workshop in 2019, and other publications will be released. Before developing his interests in data science, he entered many side-tracks on his professional development path, which touched upon web technologies, software development and business intelligence.
Supervisors: Dr. Alessandra Mileo
PROJECTS
Optimisation and Constraint Programming 2
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OTHER TEAM MEMBERS
Dhairya B. Dalal
PhD Researcher
Dhairya Dalal is a Ph.D. student in the Unit for Natural Language Processing at the Data Science Institute (DSI) at NUI Galway and is supervised by Dr. Paul Buitelaar and Dr. Mihael Arcan. Dhairya is broadly interested in developing unified language models to support causal reasoning over texts and natural language understanding. His research focuses on structuring knowledge within language models with external knowledge graphs to support causal reasoning across various NLP tasks including question answering, information retrieval, relation extraction, and event linking.
Before joining NUI Galway, Dhairya led deep learning research at the MIT-based fintech startup Posh Technologies. He has ten years of industry and startup experience in applied deep learning, data science, and technical project management. Dhairya has worked at the VC-backed AI startup Talla, the Allen Institutes for Artificial Intelligence and Brain Science, and Harvard University. Dhairya is passionate about the intersection of social impact and technology. He co-founded the non-profit City Awake, which was acquired by the Boston Chamber of Commerce, and ran Boston’s first social impact startup accelerator in partnership with the Unreasonable Institute. Dhairya has a Masters’s degree in Software Engineering from Harvard University, where he completed his thesis under the guidance of Dr. Stuart Shieber. His undergraduate degrees are in English and Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Rochester.
Supervisors: Dr. Paul Buitelaar
PROJECTS
Optimisation and Constraint Programming 2
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PUBLICATIONS
OTHER TEAM MEMBERS
An Nguyen Pham
PhD Researcher
My name is An, I am from Vietnam. My previous major was Mathematics, specialising in Analysis. At the moment, I am a first year PhD student at School of Computing, DCU. Regarding my research interests, I would like to apply Machine Learning, Deep Learning and also Mathematical aspects such as Statistics to the financial field. For instance, using Deep Learning to predict stock prices and forecast the crisis in the financial market. When I have free time, I like to relax by cooking or simply reading my favourite books.
Supervisors: Dr. Martin Crane
PROJECTS
Optimisation and Constraint Programming
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Yucheng Shi
PhD Researcher
Yucheng is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Distributed Simulation Group (DSG) of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, where Professor Vinny Cahill supervises him. Prof Vinny ‘s research field includes Reinforcement Learning (RL) , Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), and Distributed Simulation, a subfield of Intelligent Transportation aiming to deliver high-quality traffic management solution while reducing the average travel time in highway and intersection scenario.
Yucheng holds an MSc. in Software Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His proposal focuses on Multi-agent Reinforcement learning on Intersection Management joining the CRT-AI funded PhD programme. Yucheng now is working on the Slot-Base Driving (SBD) management algorithm on the highway, which allows the vehicle to follow a real-time calculated trajectory and eventually drive into its target slot. The project aimed to improve the vehicle’s arrival rate performance without any collision compared with traditional ramp metering and traffic light. In his spare time, Yucheng enjoys reading, gaming, and sports, especially basketball.
Supervisors: Professor Vinny Cahill
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