SEFS Postgraduate Publication of the Year 2021

11 Mar 2022

Andrew Flynn: Awardee of the SEFS Postgraduate Publication of the Year 2021

Andrew Flynn was awarded the 2021 SEFS Postgraduate Publication of the Year for his paper on "Multifunctionality in a reservoir computer", which was published in Chaos. In a collaboration with his supervisors, Dr Andreas Amann (School of Mathematical Sciences) and Dr Vassilios A. Tsachouridis (Collins Aerospace), Andrew introduced the new concept of "Multifunctionality" into machine learning. Multifunctionality describes the ability of a network to learn more than one dynamical task, without the need to switch between different network configurations. As such, multifunctionality re-uses existing connections in the network, and is therefore mimicking the situation in biological neural networks, where the ability to learn and perform new tasks needs to be accommodated in the existing framework. The paper is therefore an important contribution at the interface between machine learning, dynamical systems and network science.

This research was undertaken as part of Andrews's PhD project and supported by the Irish Research Council and Collins Aerospace - Applied Research & Technology, Cork, Ireland under the IRC Enterprise Partnership Scheme.

The runners-up of the 2021 SEFS Postgraduate Publication of the Year are (in alphabetical order):

• Fengyun Gu for the paper
  Fengyun Gu, Finbarr O’Sullivan, Mark Muzi, David A Mankoff
  Quantitation of multiple injection dynamic PET scans: an investigation of the benefits of pooling data from separate scans when mapping kinetics.Phys Med Biol. 66, 13 (2021)
• Fengyun Gu, Qi Wu for the paper
  Finbarr O’Sullivan, Fengyun Gu, Qi Wu, Liam D O’Suilleabhain
  A Generalized Linear modeling approach to bootstrapping multi-frame PET image data
  Med Image Anal. 72, 102132 (2021).
• Rory Humphries for the paper
  Rory Humphries, Mary Spillane, Kieran Mulchrone, Sebastian Wieczorek, Micheal O’Riordain, Philipp Hövel
  A Metapopulation Network Model for the Spreading of SARS-CoV-2: Case Study for Ireland
  Infectious Disease Modeling 6, 420 (2021).

For more on this story contact:

For further information, please contact Dr Andreas Amann.