Thomas Welsh

University of Iceland | HI · Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science

Supply chain fraud involving counterfeit or adulterated products presents threats to human health and safety. Quality Inspection is a key fraud mitigation tool where inspection planning involves allocating inspection resources across geographically dispersed assets considering both the cost and value of the inspection. I4.0 environments pose furthe...

Objective This study aims to gather public opinion on the Irish “COVID Tracker” digital contact tracing (DCT) App, with particular focus on App usage, usability, usefulness, technological issues encountered, and potential changes to the App. Methods A 35-item online questionnaire was deployed for 10 days in October 2020, 3 months after the launch...

The effective functioning of society is increasingly reliant on supply chains which are susceptible to fraud, such as the distribution of adulterated products. Inspection is a key tool for mitigating fraud, however it has traditionally been constrained by physical characteristics of supply chains such as their size and geographical distribution. Th...

Background: Digital contact tracing apps have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt COVID-19 transmission by rapidly identifying secondary cases prior to the onset of infectiousness and linking them into a system of quarantine, testing, and health care worker case management. The international experience of digital contact tr...

BACKGROUND The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 3 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against variants are still un...

Background: The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 4 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against potential variants...

Software systems are increasingly making decisions on behalf of humans, raising concerns about the fairness of such decisions. Such concerns are usually attributed to flaws in algorithmic design or biased data, but we argue that they are often the result of a lack of explicit specification of fairness requirements. However, such requirements are ch...

BACKGROUND Novel software applications (“Apps”) that can potentially simplify the laborious work of manual contact tracing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are a tempting prospect. Given this potential, many countries have designed, developed and deployed Apps before their efficacy has been established. The Irish health service launched the “CO...

Background Digital Contact Tracing is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of Covid-19. But it requires high uptake and continued participation across the population to be effective. To achieve sufficient uptake/participation, health authorities should address, and thus be aware of, user concerns. Aim This work manually analyzes user rev...

BACKGROUND Digital contact tracing apps (DCTAs) have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) transmission. Despite many countries deploying DCTAs, few have disrupted COVID-19 transmission sufficiently to avoid the most restrictive social distancing measures. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to describe and pro...

Contact Tracing (CT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses, such as Covid-19. Given near ubiquitous societal usage of mobile devices, governments globally are choosing to augment manual CT with CT applications (CTAs) on smart phones. While a plethora of solutions have been spawned, their overall effectiveness is based on majo...

Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses such as Covid-19, but it requires uptake and participation in the technology across a large proportion of the population to be effective. While we observe the pervasive uptake of mobile device usage across our society, the installation and usage of contact tra...

Background: Contact tracing remains a critical part of controlling COVID-19 spread. Many countries have developed novel software applications (Apps) in an effort to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Aim: Conduct a national survey of the Irish population to examine barriers and levers to the use of a contact tracing App. Methods: Adu...

Background: Contact tracing remains a critical part of controlling the spread of COVID-19. Many countries have developed novel software applications (Apps) in an effort to augment traditional contact tracing methods. Aim: To conduct a national survey of the Irish population to examine barriers and levers to the use of a contact tracing App. Methods...

Cloud infrastructures are highly favoured as a computing delivery model worldwide, creating a strong societal dependence. It is therefore vital to enhance their resilience, providing persistent service delivery under a variety of conditions. Cloud environments are highly complex and continuously evolving. Additionally, the plethora of use-cases ens...

With the pervasive introduction of IoE technologies, use-cases are frequently being found operating within harsh environmental conditions. This decrees the need for solutions which permit service delivery to operate in a highly-resilient manner. This work presents an architecture for a novel cloud platform designed for resilient service delivery. I...

Testing is a vital component of the system development life cycle. As information systems infrastructure move from native computing to cloud-based and virtualized platforms, it becomes necessary to evaluate their effectiveness to ensure completion of organisational goals. However, the complexity and scale of virtualized environments makes this proc...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. However the heterogeneous nature of devices and protocols in use, the sensitivity of the data contained within, as well as the legal and privacy issues, make security for the IoT a growing research priority and industry concern. With many security practices being unsuitable due to their r...

With mobile computing being the number one user paradigm of choice, and cloud computing becoming the chosen supporting infrastructure, the aggregation of these two areas is inevitable. Yet due to their novelty, they suffer from both inherited and new issues. Social computing theory can apply well to this fusion, such as pooling together in a social...

The development of resilient distributed systems is seen as essential to maintaining stable business and staterun processes due to information systems now underpinning most aspects of society. Cloud computing is now one of the most pervasive usage paradigms and due its novelty, research surrounding its resilience is largely lacking and often varied...

The multi-tenant Cloud environment creates a plethora of both technical and legal difficulties for digital forensics. Digital forensics typically relies on the analysis of evidence images or residual data. Due to the distributed nature of cloud environments can cause the required dataset to scale rapidly. When coupled with diversely heterogeneous e...

Both mobile and cloud computing are two areas which are rapidly expanding in terms of use case and functionality. Whilst mobile computing enables a variety of feature rich functionality for users in a non-fixed location, cloud computing is revolu-tionising the way in which computing resources are being provisioned, used and optimised for both servi...

The need for the analysis of energy consumption has become greater due to the constrained resources of mobile devices afforded by the increased usage of mobile devices and the environmental footprint of large-scale, distributed systems. Energy usage has previously been modelled for a variety of use cases in order to optimise its consumption, throug...

Both mobile and cloud computing are two areas which are rapidly expanding in terms of use case and functionality.Both mobile and cloud computing are two areas which are rapidly expanding in terms of use case and functionality. This paper reviews current work in energy consumption of mobile cloud computing and then proposes a system whereby user app...

With Cloud adoption becoming more widespread, the need to ensure the security of its environments becomes greater. It has previously been shown how such environments may enable a form of Cloud-aware malware which the current state-of-the art in defence does not take into account and would struggle to defend against. Therefore the contribution of th...

The current worldwide recession has led to a reduction in spending and a tightening of budget at all levels. Measures such as cuts in wages, lower pension pay-outs and rising unemployment seem to go hand-in-hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In recent times, certain areas of Europe have been met with widespread protest...

As Cloud Computing continues to evolve the majority of research tends to lean towards optimising, securing and improving Cloud technologies. Less work appears which leverages the architectural and economic advantages of the Cloud. This paper examines the Cloud as a security testing environment, having a number of purposes such as penetration testin...

Security within Cloud environments is a key issue for those both considering adopting the Cloud paradigm and those who already have. One reason for this is due to a lack of knowledge concerning security within the Cloud, mostly due to its novelty. This paper examines the feasibility of malware which may propagate around Cloud based infrastructures....

This paper investigates the observer-based H∞ control problem for a class of discrete-time Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy delay systems. sufficient conditions for the existence of an observer-based feedback controller are derived, such that the closed-loop control system is asymptotically mean-square stable and preserves a guaranteed H∞ performance. Then a li...

The data mined from social networks has been shown to have an inherent wealth of information. However the heterogeneous nature of this data along with difficulties in predetermining its rate and source makes collecting and aggregating it an often inefficiently run task. This paper presents a platform which leverages some of the architecture and fea...

This paper is presented as part of a collaborative research project to develop a complex Cloud Service Delivery Platform (CSDP). The aim of the project is to develop a new disruptive approach for service provision to enable the creation of new value chains via Cloud Technology. This paper is primarily concerned with designing and implementing a nov...