Three students at Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) have won prestigious postgraduate scholarships from the Irish Research Council.
The award scheme offers scholarships for students to pursue a research Masters or PhD. These can be either traditional or structured, in any discipline and at any eligible Irish higher education institution.
AIT’s three successful scholars, Conor Keighrey, Jonny O’Dwyer and Gavin Burke, are all former undergraduate students of the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics. They are part of a prestigious group of researchers in Ireland to receive this award.
Conor’s research will focus on the creation of immersive virtual reality applications for language categorisation and development skills. The aim is to create a system that can help both children and adults who have expressive and receptive language speech difficulties.
Jonny will be working in the area of affective computing. Affective computing looks at how intelligent devices can recognise and respond to a user’s emotions. His project will gather cues from a user’s speech, posture and eye-gaze to predict emotional states.
Finally, Gavin’s PhD researches the development of an electroactive polymer for the repair of peripheral nerve severed by a length greater than 3cm. This is a topic in which there has been growing research interest in recent years.
The Irish Research Council Funded by the State under the National Development Plan, manage the prestigious Government of Ireland Postgraduate Award Scholarship. The Irish Research Council has opened the 2017 call for the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship scheme. This will close for applications on 2nd November 2016 at 16.00.
