Mehdi Yekrangi achieved his B.Sc. in Information technology from IUST (Iran University of Science and Technology) and his M.Sc. in E-commerce from QIAU (Qazvin Islamic Azad University), Mehdi joined the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence. He has a great interest in the Financial Markets which interested him to start learning and working in CFD markets, dealing with various data produced daily in these markets from the very beginning of his undergraduate studies. During his undergraduate studies, he was mostly engaged in developing applications and websites; and due to his great interest in the finance domain, he developed an application with advanced capabilities for accounting affairs for his Bachelor’s graduation work. The abundant data in Social Networks and Financial Markets have always fascinated him to employ it gaining novel insights about sentiments and market behaviors. Therefore, he continued his Master’s studies focused on Natural Language Processing and Sentiment analysis in the Financial Markets. During his researches, he has worked on the relationship between social networks and currency market trends to develop a domain-specific lexicon for Sentiment Analysis in the Financial Markets which has resulted in a journal paper. Since his experiences in the Financial Markets are in close connection with Data Science, he has worked with various kinds of structured/unstructured data. He has applied various Data Mining and Machine Learning methods and techniques solving challenges and problems while improving Technical, Fundamental, and Sentimental approaches to enhance investment results. Mehdi is now working on the ontologies and developing trustworthy resources for Sentiment Analysis in the financial domain and employing them in deep learning architectures.

Supervisor: Dr. Nikola Nikolov & Professor Tiziana Margaria 

Enda O’Shea is currently a PhD student in the Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) program. He did his undergraduate in Computer Systems at the University of Limerick, graduating in 2017 with First-Class Honours. He has master’s degrees, with Distinction and Merit respectively, in Rigorous Software Development (NUIM, 2018) and Knowledge Based Systems (University of St Andrews, 2019), in addition to a Level 7 degree in Business and Finance (L.I.T, 2006.) He has worked on projects in areas relating to Head Pose Estimation, Natural Language Processing, and Formal Verification.

His current PhD research, under the supervision of Professor Tiziana Margaria and Dr. Ciara Breathnach as project leader, is an interdisciplinary project between the Digital Humanities and Computer Science departments in the University of Limerick. Death and Burial Data for Ireland (DBDIrl) have been supplied by the General Registrar’s Office (GRO) in Dublin for the period 1864-1922 to allow researchers to determine the causality of deaths, particularly related to young women, allowing for a potential greater understanding of the power dynamics in everyday life throughout this period. His research is the development of a Machine Transcription Pipeline for these handwritten historical records, covering technical areas such as image processing, segmentation, NLP, and data structures.

He has also worked for approx. 8 years in industry across various roles from Payroll, Access Security, and I.T Base Business. His interests outside of work include Hurling, Rugby, Soccer and Chess.

Supervisors: Professor Tiziana Margaria, Dr. Ciara Breathnach 

Hedieh graduated from the University of Applied Science and Technology, Iran with a Bachelor’s degree in Control and Instrumentation Engineering in 2015. After finishing Electronics Engineering at technical high school, parallel to her undergraduate study at university, Hedieh worked as an electronic products manufacturing manager in different companies for three years. She knows PLC programming and development, industrial automation, and developing sensor and actuator systems. She is Bronze medal winner (3rd place) in Iranian national mechatronic skill competition with the Mashhad city student team in 2011.
Currently, Hedieh is a PhD student at the Centre for Robotics and Intelligent System (CRIS). Her PhD project is funded by the Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) supervised by Prof. Daniel Toal and Prof. Tiziana Margaria. She is interested in machine learning and applications of artificial intelligence in industrial robotics and automation.

Supervisors: Professor Daniel Toal

Mahsa is a PhD student in the BDS lab at University of Limerick. Her research interests are Deep learning, Evolutionary Algorithms & Grammatical Evolution, Hybrid-Algorithms and Bioinformatics. She did her Bachelor’s degree in Physics, a field that showed her how she can understand the world by analytical, computational and experimental approaches. She was a member of the Astronomy Society, the Student Union, and the organizing committee of several scientific conferences and charity events.

She also joined the Hybrid Machines group in the Mechanical Engineering department. The other important part of academia that she has loved is doing research. She developed her first research experience during the two final year research projects that she did as part of her undergraduate studies,“Measuring the Intercellular Electromagnetic Interaction” and “Designing and Building a Laser-based Apparatus for Distance Measuring”. To prepare herself for entering a postgraduate program, she committed herself to more experience in different research areas such as data science and computer programming. She has worked as an Intern at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, at University of Limerick. She has published research work in various international conferences and journals.

Away from academia, she has gained invaluable work experience in different areas. She formed a startup which designed and implemented experimental setups for fascinating physics and chemistry experiments. They provided weekly lab classes at primary schools, held weekly lab sessions for children at the Isfahan Physics Center and planed public science exhibitions. She has also tutored high school students in mathematics, worked at the Shahre Ketab bookstores and taught English to children in kindergarten.