Prof. Mark Keane

PhD (1987, TCD), BA (1982, UCD)

Mark Keane is the Chair of Computer Science, at University College Dublin and founding Director of the Smart Media Institute at UCD. He previously worked at Queen Mary College, University of London, the Open University, Cardiff University and Trinity College Dublin. Keane has made significant contributions to both Cognitive and Computer Science and has a proven track record in the rapid establishment of successful research centres.

Prof. Keane has extensive experience in growing excellent, large-scale research groupings. UCD has the largest Computer Science postgraduate school in Ireland and at almost 6 postgraduates per staff member has a ratio that compares favorably with international standards. During the same period, research income has also increased from €300,000 to over €3M per annum. This funding has been won in international competition from the European Commission (e.g., Marie-Curie Fellowships), US Office of Naval Research, Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland (of two Investigator Award applications made this year both were successful).

Prof. Dermot Diamond

PhD (1987, TCD), BA (1982, UCD)

• Vice President for Research, Dublin City University
• Founder Member, National Centre for Sensor Research, Dublin City University 1995
• Editorial Board Member Analytical Chemistry (ACS) A – Section 2000-2003, The Analyst (RSC), Talanta (Elsevier)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2002)
• Awarded inaugural silver medal for Sensor Research by the Royal Society of Chemistry, June 2002
• Awarded D.Sc. July 2002 by Queen’s University Belfast

Professor Dermot Diamond received his Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast (Chemical Sensors, 1987), and is currently Vice president for Research at Dublin City University, Ireland.
He has published over 100 peer reviewed papers in international science journals, is a named inventor in 8 patents, and is co-author and editor of two books, ‘Spreadsheet Applications in Chemistry using Microsoft Excel’ (1997) and ‘Principles of Chemical and Biological Sensors’, (1998) both published by Wiley.

Research Interests

Wide ranging from molecular recognition, host-guest chemistry, ligand design and synthesis, electrochemical and optical chemical sensors and biosensors, lab-on-a-chip, sensor applications in environmental, clinical, food quality and process monitoring, development of fully autonomous sensing devices, wireless sensors and sensor networking. Numerous international collaborations in Europe, USA and Australia. Particularly interested in developing the potential of analytical devices and sensors as information providers for wireless networked systems i.e. generating true ‘context awareness’.

Mr. Gregory O'Hare

MSc (1984, University of Ulster), BSc (1983, University of Ulster)

Gregory is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at University College Dublin (UCD). He has published over 85 refereed papers/chapters, 4 books and has won significant grant income (ca €2.2M). This research funding has been accrued from the European Commission, Enterprise Ireland, EPSRC, DTI, Higher Education Authority and Industrial sources.

His research interests are in the areas of Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) and Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing. See www.cs.ucd.ie/staff/gohare for more information.

Current and past collaborators include Ericsson Expertise, Media Lab Europe, MIT Media Lab, University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST), Apple Computers, CB&J France, GPT Systems, AMS Systems, Sogitech, Siemens, University of Edinburgh, Matra Marconi Systems, University of Siena, IP-CNR Rome, GMD, SINTEF Norway, Alcatel Italy, Joint Research Centre (JRC) EU, Ispra, AssiDoman, and Daimler-Benz.

Dr. Noel E. O’Connor

Dr. Noel E. O’Connor is currently a lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering of Dublin City University. He is the Programme Chair of the BEng in Digital Media Engineering undergraduate degree programme. He is a Principal Investigator (PI) in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) - an interdisciplinary University Designated Research Centre.

He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Science Foundation Ireland funded Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and of the Steering Committee of the RINCE (Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering) national centre of excellence in ICT. He is a member of both the Technical Committee and Steering Committee of the EU FP5 SCHEMA Network of Excellence in Content-based Semantic Scene Analysis and Information Retrieval. He is a member of the Technical Management Committee of the EU FP6 aceMedia Integrated Project. He is coordinator of the QIMERA project, a pan-European research initiative in video object segmentation and tracking.

Since July 2000, he has published 3 journal papers and 33 peer reviewed papers in international conference proceedings, has filed 6 patents, and has generated over €3.7M in funding both individually and jointly with the other PIs in the CDVP. He is a reviewer for Signal Processing: Image Communication (Elsevier), the Eurasip Journal of Advanced Signal Processing, IEEE Trans. on Circuits Systems and Video Technology and IEEE Trans on Image Processing, as well as being a member of the Programme Committee of a number of respected international conferences and workshops. He is a member of the IEE Visual Information Engineering Technical Advisory Panel. In the past he has worked on several EU ACTS projects, including MoMuSys, DICEMAN and KIMSAC. He was the Irish representative to the EU COST 211 action and has also been an Irish representative and Head of National Delegation to the world-wide ISO/IEC MPEG standards body.

Prof. Alan Smeaton

PhD (1987, UCD), MSc (1982, UCD), BSc (1980, UCD)

Alan is Professor of Computing in School of Computing at Dublin City University. Since 1998 he is also Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and from 1999 to 2002 he was Head of the School of Computer Applications. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing, a cross-disciplinary research centre at Dublin City University with 35 researchers, which was awarded "University Designated Research Centre" status in 2000. The earlier part of Prof. Smeaton’s research career was devoted to finding applications for natural language processing in text-based information retrieval tasks. This soon moved on to developing techniques for information retrieval from image, spoken audio and latterly, video databases. Smeaton is strongly connected with both the information retrieval and digital libraries research communities and in over 15 years of funded research from European and Irish research funding agencies, and from industry, he has won over €4.25 million in competitive funding programmes.

Prof. Barry Smyth

PhD (1996,TCD), BSc (1991, UCD)

Barry is Digital Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin and an ECCAI Fellow (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence). He has published over 150 scientific articles in leading journals and conferences and has received numerous awards for his research, including IJCAI and ECAI best paper awards. He leads a team of approximately 20 researchers in the area of personalized information systems.

In 1999, Prof. Smyth co-founded ChangingWorlds Ltd to commercialize the ClixSmart personalization technology. Since this time ChangingWorlds has received in excess of $7m in venture capital funding and currently employes more than 40 employees and has deployed its personalization technology among European leading mobile operators and across a user-base of millions.