FEC - School of Computing
School of Computing

Prof
Alan
Smeaton

Primary Department
Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Role
Full Professor
Work Area/Key Responsibilities
School of Computing
Full Professor
Phone number: 01 700
5262
Campus
Glasnevin Campus
Room Number
N1.10

Academic biography

Alan Smeaton joined DCU from University College Dublin where he completed his PhD. He was subsequently appointed Senior Lecturer then Full Professor of Computing, in 1997.  He has been Executive Dean of Faculty and Head of the School of Computing (twice).

Alan is a founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics which has 400 researchers across Universities in Ireland and was the largest non-capital public research award ever given in Ireland though he has stepped back from his executive role in directing this in order to concentrate on his own teaching and research.  He is a regular contributor to Irish and international media with a dozen media “pieces” each year on radio, TV, news and online, in Ireland and internationally and on topics usually around Artificial Intelligence, data analytics, and technology in general.

His early research covered the application of natural language processing techniques to information retrieval. This broadened to cover content-based retrieval of information in all media, including text, image, audio and digital video. Alan’s current research interests are around human memory and how we forget and remember some things and not others. For years we’ve been building systems that help people find information accurately and quickly, yet half the time people are searching for things they once knew but have forgotten.  This means that the techniques he develops and the tools he uses are AI, machine learning and data analytics, and the applications of text, image, and video analysis are in areas including learning analytics which is the basis for his PFHEA award, personal sensing, and lifelogging. 

Alan is a Fellow of the IEEE, Principal Fellow of AdvanceHE the Higher Education Academy (2021), elected member of the Royal Irish Academy (2013), an Academy Gold Medal winner (2016) and winner of the SIGMM Technical Achievement award for outstanding technical contributions to multimedia computing, communications and applications (2022). He is a winner of several awards and prizes including the Mark Everingham prize, the Niwa-Takayanagi prize and the Strix award.  He was a board member of the Irish Research Council for 7 years and a member of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Inaugural Scientific Committee (2015-2018).  He has more than 21,300 citations to his +70

Research interests

Alan Smeaton's research has always been around the topic of information retrieval (IR) and has covered the application of natural language analysis to IR, fast implementation of IR, IR from spoken databases, IR from hypertexts, IR across different languages (text documents) and IR from image and video databases. His current research is around information retrieval from very large collections of digital video, video analysis and computer vision, lifelogging and use of technology in education. This latter topic includes using student data footprints to predict course outcome and using student data to address issues of student wellness and student wellbeing.
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