David Bourke

Celebrating thesis submission

My name is David Bourke, and I am a Computer Engineering student studying for my integrated Masters degree in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Before coming to TCD, I completed a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). I became interested in High Performance Computing while developing a lattice model protein folding simulation as a student at DIT. This protein folding simulation was deployed to the Fionn supercomputer, which is owned by the Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC).

Last summer, I worked with a security startup and developed software for digital camera source identification and fingerprinting based on Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU). I have experience with Python, Golang, C, C++, CUDA, Matlab, BASH and Julia. I have also worked with ARMv7, x86 / x86_64, MC6800, and MC6809 assembly. I have worked with VHDL and Verilog, and believe that FPGAs will be increasingly utilized in High Performance Computing as it becomes more difficult to develop faster processors due to the end of Moore’s law.

When I am not debugging code, I enjoy rock climbing, hiking and fencing, with saber being my preferred weapon. Aside from sports I also plays the guitar and enjoy live music.

I will be working on the project, “Visualization of real motion of human body based on motion capture technology“. This project will involve generating a 3D model of a human skeleton based on images captured from computed tomography scanning, and creating a visualization of motion using motion capture technology and inverse kinematics. The visualization will be developed using Blender and Unity3D. I chose this project because I am interested in computer vision, image processing and visualization. Particularly, I am interested in learning about biomedical image processing. I am enjoying my stay in the Czech Republic so far, and look forward to learning more about the country as I stay here.