What academic level is the AICUR conference designed for?

The AICUR conference is specifically designed for college-level students, offering them a dedicated platform to present their research.

What is the format of the AICUR conference?

The conference is a physical event, allowing for in-person presentations and networking opportunities in Limererick.

All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) 2026

Name: All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) 2026
Start: 2026-03-25 00:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-25 00:00:00+00:00
Location: Limererick

Mar 25, 2026Limererick, IrelandIn-person

Registration open

The All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) provides a platform for college-level students to present their scholarly work. Hosted in Limererick, IRL, this conference is designed to foster research skills and academic discourse among the next generation of scholars. It serves as a crucial event for undergraduates to engage with a broader academic community and gain experience in presenting their findings.

Committees & topics

Topics
Innovating for Impact: Undergraduate Research Shaping Tomorrow · Deep Learning-Driven Leaf Segmentation for Plant Disease Classification Using EfficientNet-B1 · Drag Kings in Contemporary Ireland · Modelling Dynamical Systems from Noisy Data: Parameter Estimation for the Mass-Spring-Damper System · Queer Representation in the Media: A Diachronic Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Reclaimed Language in English Newspapers, 1993–2021 · Designing a Circular Furniture Product Using Irish-Grown Wool · Acetylcholine and Cellular Respiration: Effects on Oxidised Pyridine Nucleotides in Raphanus sativus · Mental Illness Among the Enslaved in the United States

Why it matters

This conference is significant for several reasons. For individual students, it offers an invaluable opportunity to hone presentation skills, receive feedback on their research, and network with peers and faculty from various institutions. Such experiences are foundational for those considering postgraduate studies or careers in research, providing a taste of academic life beyond the classroom.

From an institutional perspective, AICUR contributes to the overall enhancement of undergraduate education across Ireland. By encouraging research at the college level, it helps to cultivate a culture of inquiry and critical thinking. This, in turn, can lead to higher quality graduates who are better equipped to tackle complex challenges in their chosen fields.

Furthermore, the conference facilitates collaboration and knowledge exchange among different universities within IRL. It allows institutions to showcase the caliber of their undergraduate research programs and identify areas for potential inter-institutional cooperation. This collective effort strengthens the academic landscape of the entire island.

How to prepare

To maximize the benefits of participating in AICUR, prospective attendees should focus on several key areas. First, meticulous preparation of research presentations is paramount. This includes not only the content of the research but also the clarity and conciseness of its delivery, whether through oral presentations or poster sessions.

Students should also consider how their research fits into broader academic discussions. Understanding the existing literature and identifying the unique contribution of their work will enhance their ability to engage in meaningful dialogue with other participants. This involves a strong grasp of their methodology and findings, as well as an awareness of potential limitations and future research directions.

Finally, attendees should prepare for networking opportunities. This involves practicing how to articulate their research interests succinctly and being open to engaging with diverse perspectives. Developing these interpersonal skills is as crucial as the academic presentation itself, as it can lead to valuable connections and future collaborations.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 2 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Ireland

Host and primary beneficiary of the conference, fostering national academic excellence.

Role in topic

As the host nation, IRL plays a central role in organizing and facilitating the conference. Its universities are the primary contributors of undergraduate researchers, and the event aims to elevate the standard of college-level research across the country. The conference in Limererick underscores IRL's commitment to nurturing academic talent and promoting a vibrant research ecosystem.

United Kingdom

Potential participant and collaborator, given geographical and historical ties.

Role in topic

While the conference is 'All Ireland,' institutions from GBR, particularly Northern Ireland, often have strong academic links with their counterparts in IRL. Participation from GBR could enrich the diversity of research presented and foster cross-border academic collaboration, aligning with broader efforts to strengthen research ties between the two nations.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Innovating for Impact: Undergraduate Research Shaping Tomorrow

Undergraduate research has expanded significantly across Irish and international higher education over the past two decades, moving from a niche enrichment activity to a core pillar of university strategy. Bodies such as the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) in the United States, the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR), and the All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) have helped institutionalise the model, while EU initiatives like Horizon Europe and the European Universities Alliances have emphasised research-led teaching and student-as-partner pedagogy. The broader context is one of mounting pressure on universities to demonstrate societal and economic impact. National strategies such as Ireland's Impact 2030 and the UK's Research Excellence Framework now reward research that translates into policy, industry, and community outcomes. Undergraduate researchers, traditionally excluded from impact metrics, are increasingly contributing to interdisciplinary problems — from climate adaptation and AI ethics to public health and cultural heritage. The contemporary debate centres on how to scale undergraduate research equitably, how to credit student contributions in formal outputs, and how to align early-career inquiry with grand challenges including the UN Sustainable Development Goals. AICUR sits within this conversation as an all-island platform showcasing how undergraduate work can move beyond classroom exercises into genuine scholarly and applied contribution.

Key players

Deep Learning-Driven Leaf Segmentation for Plant Disease Classification Using EfficientNet-B1

Plant disease is a persistent threat to global food security, with the FAO estimating that up to 40% of global crop production is lost annually to pests and pathogens. Traditional diagnosis relies on expert visual inspection, which is slow, subjective, and inaccessible in many smallholder contexts. Since the mid-2010s, advances in convolutional neural networks — beginning with AlexNet (2012) and accelerating through ResNet, MobileNet, and the EfficientNet family released by Google Research in 2019 — have enabled automated image-based disease classification with accuracies rivalling human experts. A central technical challenge is that field images contain cluttered backgrounds, variable lighting, and overlapping foliage, which degrade classification performance. Two-stage pipelines that first segment the leaf and then classify the lesion have therefore become a dominant paradigm. EfficientNet-B1, with its compound scaling and relatively modest parameter count, is particularly attractive for deployment on edge devices used in precision agriculture. Public datasets such as PlantVillage, PlantDoc, and the Leaf Segmentation Challenge (LSC) corpus have accelerated benchmarking. Current research focuses on generalisation beyond curated datasets, robustness to real-field conditions, and integration into mobile diagnostic tools deployed by agricultural extension services. The work intersects with broader debates about AI in agriculture, data sovereignty for farmers, and the role of open models in supporting food systems across both high-income and developing economies.

Key players

Drag Kings in Contemporary Ireland

Drag king performance — in which performers, typically assigned female at birth or non-binary, embody masculinity on stage — has a long lineage stretching from the male impersonators of Victorian music halls through figures such as Vesta Tilley and Stormé DeLarverie, whose resistance at the 1969 Stonewall uprising is widely credited as a catalyst of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. Despite this heritage, drag kings have historically received far less visibility, funding, and media attention than their drag queen counterparts. In Ireland, the contemporary drag king scene has emerged in tandem with major shifts in LGBTQ+ rights: the 1993 decriminalisation of homosexuality, the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum, and the 2015 Gender Recognition Act. Dublin, Cork, Galway, and Belfast now host regular king-led nights, collectives, and festivals, with performers using the form to interrogate masculinity, gender performativity (in the Butlerian sense), Irish cultural identity, and the legacies of Catholic patriarchy. The scene has also been shaped by reactions to the global success of mainstream drag media and ongoing debates about the inclusion of trans and non-binary performers. Current scholarship and community discourse focus on questions of representation, archival absence, funding inequities through bodies such as the Arts Council of Ireland, and how Irish drag kings negotiate transnational influences while articulating distinctly local forms. The topic sits at the intersection of queer studies, performance studies, and contemporary Irish cultural history.

Key players

Modelling Dynamical Systems from Noisy Data: Parameter Estimation for the Mass-Spring-Damper System

The mass-spring-damper is one of the canonical second-order linear systems in classical mechanics and control theory, used to model phenomena from vehicle suspensions to seismic isolation and MEMS devices. Identifying its parameters — mass, stiffness, and damping — from measured data is a foundational problem in system identification, a field formalised by Ljung and others from the 1970s onward. Classical approaches include least-squares fitting, frequency-domain methods, and Kalman filtering. Real-world measurements are invariably corrupted by sensor noise, quantisation, and unmodeled dynamics, making robust parameter estimation non-trivial. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of techniques, including subspace identification, Bayesian inference (e.g. MCMC and variational methods), and data-driven approaches such as Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy, Brunton et al. 2016) and physics-informed neural networks (Raissi et al. 2019). Each method trades off interpretability, computational cost, and noise robustness differently. Current research compares these methods on benchmark problems to understand where data-driven approaches genuinely outperform classical estimators and where they introduce overfitting or instability. The mass-spring-damper serves as a tractable testbed before extending to nonlinear and higher-dimensional systems relevant to robotics, structural health monitoring, and digital twins in Industry 4.0 contexts.

Key players

Queer Representation in the Media: A Diachronic Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Reclaimed Language in English Newspapers, 1993–2021

The period from 1993 to 2021 spans a profound transformation in the legal and cultural status of LGBTQ+ communities in the English-speaking world. Landmark moments include the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland (1993), the repeal of Section 28 in the UK (2003), the US Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and the introduction of marriage equality across multiple jurisdictions. Parallel to legal change, terms such as 'queer', 'dyke', and others — historically used as slurs — have been the subject of contested reclamation by activists, academics (notably in the rise of Queer Theory following Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler), and community media. Corpus linguistics, accelerated by resources such as the British National Corpus, the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, and tools like Sketch Engine and AntConc, allows researchers to track such semantic shifts at scale. Diachronic studies have shown how newspapers act both as mirrors and as agents of linguistic change, with broadsheet and tabloid registers diverging in their adoption of reclaimed terms. Editorial style guides — including those of The Guardian, the New York Times, and the Associated Press — have evolved markedly across the period under study. Contemporary debate centres on whether mainstream media reclamation represents genuine destigmatisation or a flattening of politically charged community language, and how reclamation interacts with ongoing backlash discourses around gender and sexuality. The topic contributes to wider scholarship on media framing, slurs, and the linguistics of social change.

Key players

Designing a Circular Furniture Product Using Irish-Grown Wool

Ireland produces several thousand tonnes of raw wool annually, yet since the collapse of global wool prices in the 2010s the material has frequently been worth less than the cost of shearing, with significant volumes burned, buried, or dumped. The 2022 Irish government Review of Market Opportunities for Wool, commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, identified construction insulation, horticulture, and design products as priority diversification pathways for native wool. This sits within a broader European policy push toward the circular economy, codified in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan (2020) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (2024), which require furniture and textiles to be designed for durability, repairability, and end-of-life recovery. Wool is well-suited to circular design: it is renewable, biodegradable, flame-retardant without chemical treatment, and naturally moisture-regulating. However, Irish wool is predominantly coarse-fibre, limiting its use in apparel and steering it toward upholstery, acoustic panels, and structural textile applications. Current research and enterprise activity — including initiatives by Galway Wool Co-op, Donegal Yarns, and university design programmes — focus on whether viable furniture products can be developed at scale using Irish wool, integrating local supply chains, traceability, and disassembly-led design. The work addresses both rural economic resilience and the broader transition of the furniture sector away from petrochemical foams and composite woods.

Key players

Acetylcholine and Cellular Respiration: Effects on Oxidised Pyridine Nucleotides in Raphanus sativus

Acetylcholine (ACh) is best known as the principal neurotransmitter of the vertebrate neuromuscular junction and parasympathetic nervous system, but since the seminal work of Hartmut Wessler, Ignaz Wessler, and others from the 1990s onward, it has been recognised as a phylogenetically ancient signalling molecule present across bacteria, fungi, and plants. In plants, ACh has been implicated in ion transport, stomatal regulation, root growth, and responses to light and gravitropism, though its biochemical pathways remain less well characterised than in animals. Cellular respiration in plants depends on the oxidation and reduction of pyridine nucleotides — NAD(H) and NADP(H) — which couple glycolysis, the TCA cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. The ratio of oxidised to reduced forms is a sensitive indicator of metabolic state and can be tracked spectrophotometrically or via fluorescence. Linking ACh signalling to changes in pyridine nucleotide redox state offers a window into how a classical neurotransmitter may modulate primary metabolism in a non-neural organism. Raphanus sativus (radish) is a well-established model for plant physiology experiments due to its rapid germination, accessible tissues, and metabolic responsiveness. Current research at the undergraduate and postgraduate level often interrogates non-neuronal cholinergic systems to test whether ACh acts as a true metabolic regulator in plants, with implications for agriculture, plant stress biology, and the evolutionary origins of neurotransmitter signalling.

Key players

Mental Illness Among the Enslaved in the United States

Chattel slavery in the United States, formally established in the colonial period and abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, subjected millions of people of African descent to extreme and chronic trauma: forced labour, family separation, sexual violence, and the constant threat of physical punishment. Nineteenth-century American medicine pathologised the psychological responses of the enslaved through racist diagnostic categories, most infamously Samuel Cartwright's 1851 invention of 'drapetomania' — the supposed mental illness causing enslaved people to flee captivity — and 'dysaesthesia aethiopica'. These categories functioned as instruments of social control rather than clinical observation. Real mental suffering, however, is extensively documented in slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, the WPA Federal Writers' Project interviews of the 1930s), plantation records, and antebellum asylum admissions, including the segregated 'Howard's Grove' and Central State Hospital in Virginia. Historians such as Wendy Gonaver, Kylie Smith, and Christopher Willoughby have shown how psychiatric institutions both reflected and reinforced racial hierarchies, while scholars including Joy DeGruy have advanced frameworks such as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome to theorise intergenerational effects. Contemporary scholarship situates this history within ongoing debates about racial disparities in US mental health care, the legacies of medical racism exposed by cases such as Tuskegee, and the broader project of recovering enslaved people's interior lives from archives designed to obscure them. The topic intersects history of medicine, African American studies, and trauma studies.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

India's 33% Women’s Quota in Lok Sabha 2029

Pakistan-Linked Terror Network in Karnataka

Aarish Chhabra's Role in Indian Media Shift

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

The Power-Interest Grid

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Ireland College March 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) 2026

Mar 25, 2026Limererick, IrelandIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Innovating for Impact: Undergraduate Research Shaping Tomorrow · Deep Learning-Driven Leaf Segmentation for Plant Disease Classification Using EfficientNet-B1 · Drag Kings in Contemporary Ireland · Modelling Dynamical Systems from Noisy Data: Parameter Estimation for the Mass-Spring-Damper System · Queer Representation in the Media: A Diachronic Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Reclaimed Language in English Newspapers, 1993–2021 · Designing a Circular Furniture Product Using Irish-Grown Wool · Acetylcholine and Cellular Respiration: Effects on Oxidised Pyridine Nucleotides in Raphanus sativus · Mental Illness Among the Enslaved in the United States

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 2 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Ireland

Host and primary beneficiary of the conference, fostering national academic excellence.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

Potential participant and collaborator, given geographical and historical ties.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Innovating for Impact: Undergraduate Research Shaping Tomorrow

Key players

Deep Learning-Driven Leaf Segmentation for Plant Disease Classification Using EfficientNet-B1

Key players

Drag Kings in Contemporary Ireland

Key players

Modelling Dynamical Systems from Noisy Data: Parameter Estimation for the Mass-Spring-Damper System

Key players

Queer Representation in the Media: A Diachronic Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Reclaimed Language in English Newspapers, 1993–2021

Key players

Designing a Circular Furniture Product Using Irish-Grown Wool

Key players

Acetylcholine and Cellular Respiration: Effects on Oxidised Pyridine Nucleotides in Raphanus sativus

Key players

Mental Illness Among the Enslaved in the United States

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research (AICUR) 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

India's 33% Women’s Quota in Lok Sabha 2029

Pakistan-Linked Terror Network in Karnataka

Aarish Chhabra's Role in Indian Media Shift

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

The Power-Interest Grid

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Ireland College March 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

AICUR 2026 - All Ireland Conference for Undergraduate Research

Irish and EU Security in an Age of Global Conflict

Ireland’s Role in an era of Global Uncertainty: International Law, Human Rights and Global Security

International Affairs Conference 2026

New Voices in International Law – Early-Career Researchers Workshop

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Frequently asked questions