As the voice and sometimes face of a company, Contact Centre Agents must deal with customer inquiries efficiently and professionally. Pressures on agents include throughput-based service level goals as well as the need to ensure a top-quality service and sales experiences to customers at every point. Maintaining this quality and efficiency requires the provision of key customer history data to agents during calls without requiring agents to engage in time consuming searches across interfaces. Unfortunately the provision of such customer and case histories to the agent is far from a trivial task. Customer history summarisation is made difficult not only by enterprise-wide information integration challenges, but also by the computationally demanding task of determining the most relevant information that can be provided to the agent in bite-sized chunks.

Business process modelling is a technique for representing existing or future processes within an organisation, particularly with a view to documenting and improving them. Many business processes manipulate sophisticated data sources to generate a data set that will be subject to subsequent data analytics tasks, and their study falls within the general field of data management. User-friendly editors are available which allow business users to define business processes as a structured collection of tasks towards a specific goal. What they do not provide, however, is the ability to verify and optimise those processes or the data that they produce.

Database queries are often business-critical. But there are few methods for ensuring their correctness. Businesses need new methods and tools that increase confidence in the correctness of both standard and ad-hoc queries.

Searching online holidays websites can return hotels or villas that are very similar in location, function, and quality. Similarity is important but introducing diversity in information retrieval can significantly improve the accuracy, relevance, efficiency and effectiveness of these searches, particularly when queries are vague. Search result diversity is important as well as query similarity. When queries are vague, results should be similar to the query while at the same time being different from one another. Result diversity can provide the user with a representative sample of relevant items, rather than an incorrectly biased set of mutually similar results.

Owing to the growing concern nationally and internationally regarding food traceability and the authenticity of food products (their origin, processing and downstream delivery and storage), emphasis on tamper proof mechanisms of reliably determining this information is paramount within the food sector. Country of Origin and method of reading are major issues for the food industry, regulatory bodies and the consumer alike, particularly for internationally traded foods such as meat. Labels can be tampered with and products repackaged undermining consumer confidence and putting the consumer at risk of health related issues. To address these issues, researchers within University College Dublin have developed a novel labelling system based on the direct laser imprinting of data matrix or other formats onto a food product such as chicken breast fillets, prime beef cuts etc, using a novel food grade marking system. Using this technology, it affords the food processor, the retailer and the consumer the opportunity to access on-the-spot (real time) product information thus offering a secure tamper-proof food traceability systems for both local and global use.

Early detection of endometritis in livestock to enable successful intervention and treatment of the disease before it becomes an economic burden. Substantial economic loss occurs within dairy herds as a consequence of persistent endometritis. The resulting treatment costs, reduced fertility, increased cull rates and animal welfare consequences collectively cost over €15 billion globally per annum. The key to the reduction of these costs is early diagnosis but currently detection methods are only effective after the consequences of persistent uterine infection have already occurred. Currently there are no reliable early diagnostic or prognostic tests for animals that go on to develop chronic or subclinical endometritis. Researchers within UCD and NIBRT have developed a prognostic/diagnostic assay for the early detection of endometritis in livestock based on the detection of specific changes in glycosylation patterns that are highly correlated with the occurrence of uterine infection. This opportunity has the potential to work as a valuable prognostic tool affording farmers and veterinary practitioners the ability to intervene before the damage caused by clinical disease manifests itself. It also has the potential to be used as a phenotypic marker to enhance innate disease resistance through selective breeding programmes.

UCD has developed novel, small molecule, anti-angiogenic compounds to offer patients and clinicians cost-effective, easily administered, safe and sustainable therapeutics to prevent blindness from retinal vascular diseases. The retinal therapeutics market is estimated at $3 billion (2012); it is a high growth market with significant unmet need. The dramatic entry of Lucentis (anti-VEGF antibody intravitreal drug) into the market in 2007 and the success of anti-angiogenic drugs have highlighted the opportunity for products in the retinal disease market. The entry of topical or slow release preparations into the market would eliminate the current practice of repeated intravitreal injections and the associated safety risks and clinical burden. In addition, there is a cohort of patients unresponsive to current treatments, underscoring the need for new therapeutics.

UCD researchers have developed a microfluidic cell culture platform for cell-based assays that simultaneously exposes cells to multiple linear concentration gradients formed in different directions. Diffusion-based, stable gradients can be formed within one hour and can be maintained for days without inducing shear stresses on the cells. The platform is suitable for medium throughput screening with brightfield or fluorescence visualization/quantitation of cells via microscopic imaging or a plate reader. Combinatorial drug screening and dose optimization studies can be performed, where equal numbers of cells are exposed to combinations of each compound at defined concentrations. Other potential applications include cell migration, live-cell tracking and post-fixation immunocytochemistry.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common of hereditary cardiac conditions and is related to mutations in sarcomere proteins, the most frequent of which is MYBPC (cardiac myosin protein C). While MYPB-C mutations are associated with HCM, there is a marked heterogeneity in phenotypic responses to mutations of this gene, even within families, and this could be explained by epigenetic factors such as hypermethylation. UCD researchers have shown that the DNA methylation inhibitor 5-azacitidine (5-aza) improves cardiac function, including hypertrophy and diastology, in a murine animal model (SHR, spontaneously hypertensive rat, model) and this is associated with up-regulation of MYBP-C, and more surprisingly actin alpha1 skeletal muscle (ACTA1), gene expression in cardiomyocytes. Therefore, DNA methylation inhibitors may represent a novel therapeutic strategy for the prevention and treatment of HCM, in particular the Orphan indications HOCM and FHCM. 5-aza is a hypomethylation agent that could be repurposed for Orphan indications in HCM.

Dye-Sentitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) are an emerging low-cost third generation photovoltaic technology particularly suited for efficient light to-electricity conversion in indoors low-light environments. Electrolyte leakage due to the corrosive nature of iodine/iodide-containing electrolytes is currently the key issue preventing the technology’s productisation and wider deployment.