Prof
Alan
Smeaton
Primary Department
Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Role
Full Professor
Work Area/Key Responsibilities
School of Computing
5262
Campus
Glasnevin Campus
Room Number
N1.10
Academic biography
Alan F. Smeaton joined DCU in 1987 from University College Dublin where he completed his PhD.He was subsequently appointed Senior Lecturer and then Full Professor of Computing, in 1997. He has been Executive Dean of Faculty and Head of the School of Computing (twice). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Principal Fellow of AdvanceHE, elected member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Academy Gold Medal winner for his work.
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. We’ve never really asked why they forgot in the first
place, so Alan focuses on building systems that help people remember and to learn, not to plug the gap when
they forget. This means that the tools he uses are machine learning and data analytics, and the applications
of text, image, and video analysis are in areas like learning analytics, personal sensing, and lifelogging. This
can be summarised as developing data analytics for new and traditional forms of media.
Alan's research output includes more than 700 publications with almost 20,000 citations and a h-index of 69. He is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy and Academy Gold Medal Winner, a Fellow of the IEEE and winner of several awards and prizes including the Mark Everingham prize, the Niwa-Takayanagi prize and the Strix award. He 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 several 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.