Interview with Dirk Pesch, Professor in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland 

What is your area of research? 

My area is the Internet of Things, networking and applications of sensing and actuation technologies. There’s a large range of applications where this applies, such as smart homes, smart cities, industrial environments, and health (i.e. medical devices like blood pressure monitors, a smart watch that constantly measures our heart rate and can have information about our location, for example).  

One of the pieces of research we’re doing now looks at how can we use technology like smartphones, fitness trackers to capture information about our behaviour (how much do we sleep, when do we go to bed, how often do we exercise, for how long, how often do we look at our phone, how many messages do we send, do we send them to the same or different people, etc.). This sensing information can be translated into behavioural data, which is very much linked to our well-being, and this can inform physicians and psychologists. If we capture with traditional measures (e.g. questionnaires) whether people feel lonely, express feeling lonely or are depressed, feel anxious, etc., then this information can be used with machine learning techniques through matching behavioural information extracted from these sensors with expressions of loneliness, depression, anxiety. We can then train machine learning models, which is basically something that does pattern matching, to match behavioural patterns with expressions of loneliness or depression we obtain with traditional methods. Once we have a trained machine learning model, we can take this model and use it when we get data from new people and detect their level of loneliness, depression or anxiety.  

Using existing data and collected data from our own trials we’ve trained machine learning models to find out if people feel socially lonely, isolated, or depressed. We’ve explored what kind of behavioural features show a strong correlation to feeling depressed or feeling lonely. We’ve also experimented putting these machine learning models on smartphones with the idea that it could be a feature like a monitoring app that could suggest to the person: hey, your behaviour suggests you might be feeling lonely, what do you think yourself? why don’t you get some help, and maybe highlight some ways to seek help.  We’re not psychologists, so we wouldn’t know really what the appropriate interventions are, but we can build that on top of what we’ve been doing.  

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How did you become interested in this area of research? 

I’ve been working with a colleague in the United States (US), and he was involved in smart cities research and invited me to visit. I went to one workshop they organized at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2018, while we were discussing collaboration. There is a funding scheme between the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US, so we were looking for somebody in Northern Ireland and the person we found was working on sort of social issues in city environments. Out of that I became more interested in the social aspect, but the project didn’t go ahead. In connection with the proposal, the topic of loneliness came up and I was looking for someone who was working on loneliness, and that’s when I found Professor Eleanor Bantry White in UCC. We have been collaborating since about 2019; we’ve shared a postdoc, and we have a couple of PhD students now working together. 

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How do you see your research contributing to society, for example, what impact would you like your research to have? 
 

What I’m trying to do is look at real problems that exist in society and try to find interesting and creative solutions using scientific principles. It’s kind of trying to explore also different ways of going about finding solutions, not doing the same old. From my own work, my area of expertise, can we find a different way to do it or a new solution? That’s how I look at it. 

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What inspired you to pursue a career in research? 

I like to learn and find out new things. I’ve learned lots of things that are new to me, but at some point, I felt that maybe I could also help others learn things that nobody knows yet. That’s what research does. When I was a teenager, I was a bit of a computer nerd, I was in the early computer space in the 1980s and I learned programming before I went to university. I always like to create technical systems, but as I said earlier, at some point, I didn’t want to create these systems just for the sake of it or for my own pleasure. I wanted to do something useful with them. That’s how I got into it and how I continue to find it enjoyable and meaningful. 

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In your opinion, what are some of the most important skills needed to succeed as a researcher? 

One of the most important skills is curiosity, really willingness to learn, but also being critical and being self-critical, not just believing something because somebody says it, but looking at what others are doing and what you’re doing yourself in a critical manner. I don’t mean a critical manner as in dismissive, but in a constructive critical manner. That’s an important life skill that most people should have because there’s so much misinformation in the world these days and people believe it without being critical. I think it’s an important skill for researchers, also being curious and trying to be creative as well, because to find new solutions you often must be creative. 

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What would you consider to be your greatest achievement to date as a researcher or is there something you are currently working towards achieving? 

Well, I think what makes me most proud is that the people I’ve supervised have succeeded and have gone on to do fantastic things, really great things. That’s what I’m most proud of, not any specific single achievement. I don’t think I’ve done anything that one might consider as outstanding on the technology side, in a global context. But I think the people I’ve supported in achieving what they wanted to achieve, and I could help put them on the road to doing great things; that’s what I think is my greatest achievement. 

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What is the biggest challenge or challenges that you face or have faced as a researcher? 

It is not easy to keep your research going and to continuously find the funding to maintain a research group, to make sure you stay current, reinvent yourself every so often, not to go stale. That’s hard. I find that’s part of the hardest bit, to reinvent yourself, to keep things going and to keep it fresh. 

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Can you give an insight into any interesting ongoing or upcoming projects that you are involved in, or will be involved in? 

Science Foundation Ireland is looking for proposals for new research centres in Ireland,  
so we put together a new proposal focused on resilient networks, for resilient communities. Today we are hyper connected with each other. Our society heavily relies on resilient connectivity. We are bringing in also the social sciences to understand and to design future resilient networks that make society more resilient. So, we’ve put a proposal forward to research that with colleagues in the ADVANCE CRT, but also in the CONNECT Centre for Future Networks. 

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Can you share if and how do you see resilience and loneliness connected? 
 

You know, society faces lots of challenges such as climate change, food shortages in certain areas. We need to figure out how can we be resilient as a society to face this impact. There is an ever-growing gap between the rich and poor which is really concerning and there are lots of negative aspects that social networks bring for example. Loneliness I think is one of these aspects. From my perspective, I’m a technologist, we need to see how we can use technology in a positive way, rather than create unintended negative issues, to make us more resilient, overcoming loneliness and other well-being issues. 

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Is there any research that others are engaged in at present that is of interest to you? 

There’s a lot of stuff going on that interests me, and I’m not working on myself, but I find it interesting. I’m in this job because I like learning and I’m curious. I’m today at a big event on embedded systems, developing electronics and software that manage our modern world. I’m interested to see new creative applications of the Internet of Things like monitoring human behaviour to detect well-being issues, societal applications and maybe applications that make our environment better, that are more responsive perhaps, that could support people with disabilities, and be more energy efficient, for example. 

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If you could offer one piece of advice to someone starting out a career in research, what would it be? 

I would suggest to be open minded, be curious and develop critical thinking, don’t take what others are doing as a given, be critical about it and try to understand it, develop your own thoughts about it. I see a lot of students who are good at learning things and at repeating things, and to me they don’t seem to be critically engaging with what they’re doing. I really think that’s something important, and as I said earlier, it’s also an important life skill.