Projects per year
Personal profile
Research Statement
Research
The focus of my research is the application of tools and technologies to lead new disruptive practices and systems for many application areas. The main application areas I work with are Health & Training and Industry & Automation. I am particularly interested in how virtual and augmented reality technologies can be used in these areas and how they can change the future practices within such areas. I have over fifteen years’ experience working within the fields of software engineering, sensor fusion and real time software development and I have over ten years’ experience working within the areas of virtual and augmented reality and multi sensorial systems.
Teaching
My main teaching interests within the School are in the subject areas of Engineering Entrepreneurship and Virtual & Augmented Reality.
Achievements
During my research career I have been PI and CI on several national and European funded grants. I am actively engaged with external professional bodies and I am currently a professional registration interviewer for the IET. I have been and continues to act as an expert evaluator, recorder and Vice Chair for various calls in H2020, FP7 and FP6.
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
Recent external collaboration on country/territory level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots or
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R3464NBE: (ARISE) - Assembly and Robotics In Steel Building Erection
McPolin, D. (PI), Hester, D. (CoI) & Rafferty, K. (CoI)
02/11/2022 → …
Project: Research
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R5212ECS: PWC Research and Development Centre
Rafferty, K. (PI), Devereux, B. (CoI), Sharma, V. (CoI) & Wang, H. (CoI)
10/03/2022 → …
Project: Research
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R1337MEE: Re-Imagining Engineering Design - Growing Radical Cyber-Physical-Socio Phenotypes -PROTEUS
Price, M. (PI), Jin, Y. (CoI), Kilpatrick, P. (CoI), Kirkland, F. (CoI), Nolan, D. (CoI), Rafferty, K. (CoI) & Robinson, T. T. (CoI)
26/01/2021 → …
Project: Research
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R1129ECI: Kelvin-2 - The High Performance Computing Centre in Northern Ireland (HPC-NI)
Woods, R. (PI), Chevallier, O. (CoI), Gillan, C. (CoI), Hu, P. (CoI), Rafferty, K. (CoI), Salto-Tellez, M. (CoI), Tikhonova, I. (CoI) & Vandierendonck, H. (CoI)
04/12/2019 → …
Project: Research
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R1059AEL: Creative Industries CLuster Programme AHRC 61760R
Alcorn, M. (PI), Delaney, F. (CoI), FitzGibbon, A. (CoI), Hanna, P. (CoI), Mac Sithigh, D. (CoI), Patterson, G. (CoI), Rafferty, K. (CoI) & Schroeder, F. (CoI)
18/04/2019 → …
Project: Research
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A cross-discipline technopreneurship course: student perceived benefits and considerations
Browning, J. W., Rafferty, K., Anderson, N. & Galway, L., 26 Feb 2025, IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2024): proceedings. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 9 p. (IEEE FIE Proceedings).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Open AccessFile1 Downloads (Pure) -
Enhancing question generation through diversity-seeking reinforcement learning with bilevel policy decomposition
Ren, T., Wang, H. & Rafferty, K., 11 Apr 2025, 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings. Walsh, T., Shah, J. & Kolter, Z. (eds.). 23 ed. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Vol. 39. p. 25083-25091 9 p. (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: AAAI-25 Technical Tracks 23; vol. 39, no. 23).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
Open AccessFile21 Downloads (Pure) -
OBELLA: open the book for evaluating long-form large language model answers in open-domain question answering
Ren, T., Zhang, Z., Wang, H. & Rafferty, K., 04 Apr 2025, (Accepted) SIGIR '25: Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. ACM New York, NYResearch output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
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SMAR+NIE IdeaGen: a knowledge graph based node importance estimation with analogical reasoning on large language model for idea generation
Oyelade, O. N., Wang, H. & Rafferty, K., 15 Jun 2025, In: Expert Systems with Applications. 279, 34 p., 127455.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile14 Downloads (Pure) -
Sustainable business decision modelling with blockchain and digital twins: A survey
Wickremasinghe, G., Frost, S., Rafferty, K. & Sharma, V., 04 Jun 2025, (Early online date) In: Blockchain: Research and Applications. 100312.Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review
Open Access
Datasets
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SynFinTabs
Bradley, E. (Creator), Roman, M. (Creator), Rafferty, K. (Creator) & Devereux, B. (Creator), Hugging Face, 05 Dec 2024
DOI: 10.57967/hf/3741, https://huggingface.co/datasets/ethanbradley/synfintabs
Dataset
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Colour alignment dataset between images taken by different digital cameras
Zhao, Y. (Creator) & Rafferty, K. (Supervisor), Queen's University Belfast, Jul 2022
DOI: 10.17034/d6e61e57-ccd0-4ab6-bc5e-ff3b81294e45
Dataset
File -
pH testing dataset
Zhao, Y. (Creator) & Rafferty, K. (Supervisor), Queen's University Belfast, Jul 2022
DOI: 10.17034/4104daec-7cfb-4832-9736-ebd0b3f162e8
Dataset
File
Prizes
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Best Paper Award: 33rd International Manufacturing Conference
Gibson, Z. (Recipient), McConnell, R. (Recipient), McGeown, M. (Recipient), Butterfield, J. (Recipient), Marzano, A. (Recipient), Murphy, B. (Recipient) & Rafferty, K. (Recipient), 01 Sept 2016
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
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Best Paper Awarded by Springer
Brice, D. (Recipient) & Rafferty, K. (Recipient), 28 Jun 2019
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
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Best paper award for Niblock J*, Peng J, McMenemy K, Irwin GW
Niblock, J. (Recipient), Peng, J. (Recipient) & Rafferty, K. (Recipient), 01 Mar 2007
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
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Best Paper Presented at Digital Enterprise Technology 2016
McConnell, R. (Recipient), Butterfield, J. (Recipient), Rafferty, K. (Recipient) & Price, M. (Recipient), 01 Mar 2016
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
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Best Poster Award
Cinar, O. E. (Recipient), Rafferty, K. (Recipient), Cutting, D. (Recipient) & Wang, H. (Recipient), 29 Feb 2024
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)
File
Activities
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Enhancing Question Generation through Diversity-Seeking Reinforcement Learning with Bilevel Policy Decomposition
Ren, T. (Presenter), Wang, H. (Advisor) & Rafferty, K. (Advisor)
02 Mar 2025Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
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EC-Horizon 2020 (External organisation)
Rafferty, K. (Advisor)
01 Sept 2021 → 31 Jan 2022Activity: Membership types › Membership of public/government advisory/policy group or panel
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EC-Horizon 2020 (External organisation)
Rafferty, K. (Advisor)
01 Sept 2019 → 31 Jan 2021Activity: Membership types › Membership of public/government advisory/policy group or panel
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IET Faraday Challenge
Rafferty, K. (Organiser)
07 May 2019Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
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EC-Horizon 2020 (External organisation)
Rafferty, K. (Advisor)
28 May 2017 → 02 Jun 2017Activity: Membership types › Membership of public/government advisory/policy group or panel
Press/Media
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Phd student uses a robot to make vr feel more real.
Rafferty, K. & Devine, S.
01/05/2016 → 01/06/2016
1 item of Media coverage, 1 Media contribution
Press/Media: Research