Sept 2025: Wind Turbine Failures & The Secret Tech Life of Spraoi

Join us for our upcoming meetup on Thursday, 11th of Sept, 2025, at 7pm at the Waterford Treasures Museum (X91 K10E). Enjoy an evening of engaging talks, networking opportunities, food, drinks, and exciting spot prizes as we delve into innovative ideas shaping the technology landscape.

Speaker 1: Jonathan Dunne – Principal Data Scientist (IBM)

Jonathan Dunne has over 30 years industry experience working as a Software Developer, Systems and Performance Engineer and currently as a Principal Data Scientist. Jonathan received his PhD (Mathematics & Statistics) from Maynooth University in 2018.

Jonathan has co-authored over 20 conference and Journal Papers in Cloud Outage Detection and Network Quality of Service. He is also the holder of over 325 software patents. His research interests include Service Time Modelling and Queueing Theory. He also holds a Level 3 - Distinguished Data Scientist certification from the Open Group. He is also a Data Science governance board member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Tech Talk: Classification of wind turbine failures using hidden Markov models

A key challenge in fault prediction for mechanical systems is forecasting failures. Although this issue has been studied for over eighty years, many methods are restricted to specific domains or datasets. Our motivation to revisit this topic arises from the increasing use of Markov chains within transformer architectures in language models. We treat fault occurrence as a renewal process. Using an open-source dataset, we examine whether a hidden Markov model (HMM) can effectively predict failures in wind turbines. Our results show that an HMM approach can attain a reasonable accuracy level (0.93 vs 0.97) compared to supervised machine learning techniques like support vector machine (SVM).

---

Speaker 2: Robert O’Connor - Computer Science Lecturer (SETU)

Rob is a lecturer in the Department of Computing & Mathematics at SETU, where he is also Programme Leader for the BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. Alongside his academic role, he has built a parallel career in music, working as a musician, sound designer, radio DJ, and all-round dogsbody. In 2024, he began a part-time PhD with the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin, exploring the intersection of podcasting, science communication, and artificial intelligence.

Tech Talk: The Secret Tech Life of Spraoi

Giant robots! Pirates! Scary fairies! For over 30 years, Spraoi has been one of Ireland’s premier street arts groups. In this talk, Rob will reveal some of the technology that has brought laughter, squeals, and wonder to audiences across the country. You might be surprised at what can be achieved with an old Raspberry Pi, a bit of shell scripting, and some Python. Warning: this talk may contain dodgy music!