Dublin City University

About: Dublin City University is a education organization based out in Dublin, Ireland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Machine translation. The organization has 5904 authors who have published 17178 publications receiving 389376 citations. The organization is also known as: National Institute for Higher Education, Dublin & DCU.

Engaging with children in research Theoretical and practical implications of negotiating informed consent/assent

Abstract: At the outset of an ethnographic inquiry, we navigated national and international resources to search for theoretical and practical guidance on obtaining parents and children's informed consent/assent. While much theoretical guidance debating ethical issues to children's participation in research was found, a paucity of published papers offering practical guidance on assent processes and/or visual representations of child assent forms and information sheets was discovered. The purpose of this article is to describe our experiences, both theoretically and practically, of negotiating the process of obtaining informed consent and assent with parents and children for a non-therapeutic qualitative research study. We hope this article instigates a platform for others to explicate their experience and contributes to the construction of a coherent body of knowledge which will clearly delineate important elements that must be considered when negotiating children's agreement to participate in research.

TinyPBC: Pairings for authenticated identity-based non-interactive key distribution in sensor networks

Abstract: Key distribution in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is challenging. Symmetric cryptosystems can perform it efficiently, but they often do not provide a perfect trade-off between resilience and storage. Further, even though conventional public key and elliptic curve cryptosystem are computationally feasible on sensor nodes, protocols based on them are not. They require exchange and storage of large keys and certificates, which is expensive. Using pairing-based cryptography (PBC) protocols, conversely, parties can agree on keys without any interaction. In this work, we (i) show how security in WSNs can be bootstrapped using an authenticated identity based non-interactive protocol and (ii) present TinyPBC, to our knowledge, the most efficient implementation of PBC primitives for an 8-bit processor. TinyPBC is able to compute pairings in about 5.5s on an ATmega128L clocked at 7.3828-MHz (the MICA2 and MICAZ node microcontroller).

Transversely isotropic biological, soft tissue must be modelled using both anisotropic invariants

Abstract: Skeletal muscles, ligaments and tendons are typically assumed to be incompressible, transversely isotropic, non-linearly hyperelastic materials. If one adopts the phenomenological approach to modelling, then the corresponding strain-energy function can be represented as an arbitrary function of two invariants of the Cauchy–Green strain tensors, representing the isotropic contribution, and two pseudo-invariants, representing the anisotropic contribution. For mathematical convenience, dependence on one of these pseudo-invariants is usually dropped. It will be shown here that a necessary consequence of this reduced form of the strain-energy function is that the infinitesimal shear moduli are identical, an assumption that is not supported by experimental data. It will also be shown that a further consequence is that two out of the three shearing modes are identical over the full range of deformation. The conclusion is that transversely isotropic biological, soft tissue must be modelled using both anisotropic invariants.