National College of Ireland is a third level institution that offers a distinctive student centred learning experience, through a state-of-the-art campus located in the heart of Dublin’s vibrant international business centre. NCI has a long- standing reputation in education and has developed innovative teaching and learning technologies that are designed to support students who embark on education at all stages in their life and career.
NCI has moved rapidly from an embryonic research position to become a third level institution with an active research strategy. NCI has a number of research hubs such as Centre for Research in Learning and Teaching (CRILT) and the Early Learning Initiative (ELI).
The CRILT team is doing leading-edge research into learning and teaching and the uses of technology in learning, teaching and assessment strategies. The ELI team are focusing on early learning, early age educational development and on the challenges faced in areas and communities of social and economic disadvantage.
Research activity in the School of Computing is structured around Research in Education and Learning Technologies (REALT) group, the National e-Learning Laboratory (NELL) and Cloud Competency Centre and focuses on building and evaluating of innovative solutions that support areas of technology based learning environments, mobile and web technologies parallel and distributed/cloud computing, and data analytics. School of Computing has strong research reputation in the area of e-learning.
School of Computing has been awarded funding from Enterprise Ireland in 2007 (research equipment grant) for the development of a state-of the art e-learning usability lab (National e-Learning Laboratory (NELL)) to support applied and basic research in e-learning.
National e-Learning Laboratory (NELL) currently includes School of Computing faculty members, research students and postdoctoral researchers. NELL has sophisticated hardware and software that allow researchers to observer, record and analyze the behaviour of students interacting with e-learning resources. Learner behaviour and screen interactions are investigated using combinations of video and audio recording, screen-capture, precision keyboard and mouse logging and eye tracking. Powerful analytical software produces quantitative and qualitative reports that are used to assess Learner QoE, satisfaction and learning performance. Using state-of-the art technology and offering parallel studies of many participants NELL has attracted attention both from industry and from other 3rd level institutions.
Dr Cristina Muntean
Position: Senior Lecturer, School of Computing, National College of Ireland
Dr Cristina Muntean is the Principal investigator of the NEWTON project. She has been constantly involved in various research related activities over the past 16 years fostering and promoting research in Ireland and abroad, building academic collaborations with European Universities, leading research projects, and publishing over 80 publications in international peer-reviewed books, journals and conferences. She has been awarded 6 research grants under the European Union (EU), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Irish Research Council (IRC) funding schemes that brought almost € 1 million research funding to NCI. Dr Cristina Muntean has developed research expertise in various domains such as personalised e/m-learning, adaptive, user modelling, multimedia delivery over wired/wireless networks, Internet of Things, energy saving solutions, consumer behaviour and end-user Quality of Experience. She has received 5 research paper awards and has successfully supervised to completion PhD students, MSc by Research and taught MSc students. She was awarded the prestigious NCI President’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research in 2014 for her excellent research work.
Dr Cristina Muntean chaired or served as technical program committee member for top international conferences and acted as reviewer for several journals. She also acted as General Chair for the 14th IT&T 2015 conference.
As an academic person Dr Cristina Muntean has successfully led the full development, validation and management of new Level 8 and Level 9 programmes in the areas of Mobile Technologies, Internet of Things, Computing, Web Technologies and Cyber Security.
Dr Arghir-Nicolae Moldovan
Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Computing, National College of Ireland
Dr Arghir Nicolae Moldovan has received the B.Eng. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania, in 2008, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, Technology Enhanced Learning from National College of Ireland, in 2011 and 2014 respectively. Prior to joining NCI he worked as Telecommunication Engineer with Alcatel-Lucent Romania. Since September 2014 he worked as Associate Lecturer with NCI, teaching a range of Computer Science modules. His research interests include technology enhanced learning, mobile learning, adaptation and personalisation, user modelling, quality of experience, multimedia streaming, energy efficient systems, wireless and mobile communications, and data analytics.
Dr Pramod Pathak
Position: Dean of School of Computing, National College of Ireland
Dr Pramod Pathak, (Male) is the Co-Principal investigator of the NEWTON project and the Dean of School of Computing at National College of Ireland. In his role as Dean, he has been involved in establishing a number of research entities including successfully setting up NCI Cloud Competency Centre, National e-Learning Laboratory, REALT research group, CRIG research group. He has also been responsible for leading on a number of research conferences i.e., e-Learning Research & Development Roadmap for Ireland, Ed-Tech, IT&T and has led the creation of the doctoral programme. He has led a number of projects including Solas funded KnowIT project and KESP (Research only) project. He worked on Rosetta mission of European Space Agency before joining NCI. His main role was delivering on the software code inspection and validation of the Rosetta on-board software. This involved understanding the Orbiter and Lander (Philae) behaviour, reviewing the code and conducting the testing and evaluation of the software. He has been constantly involved in various research related activity over the past 30 years, supervising PhD and MSc students. His main research areas currently are Learning (e-assessment, pedagogy, online learning, practice testing, Flipped classroom), Analytics (learning analytics, analytics for decision-making) and application of ICT for societal challenges (mental health issues).
Ms Josephine Andrews
Position: Research Assistant, School of Computing, National College of Ireland
Josephine Andrews is a Research Assistant with School of Computing, National College of Ireland.. She received her BSc in Honours in Computing in 2016 and currently she is studying her MSc in Digital Media. Her research interests include game development and e-learning