Congratulations to Professor Conor Ryan, Professor of Machine Learning, on the Occasion of his Inaugural Lecture

Congratulations to Professor Conor Ryan, Professor of Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems on the occasion of his Inaugural Lecture at University of Limerick last evening entitled:

‘Learning from Machine Learning: What teaching machines to learn can teach us about ourselves’

Conor is also a Funded Investigator within Lero (the Irish Software Research Centre) and a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator.

Conor is interested in applying Machine Learning techniques to medical diagnosis, particularly in semi-automated mammography, and studied with Prof. Lásló Tabar in 2005 to obtain American Medical Association accreditation in Breast Cancer Screening. He also uses Machine Learning to perform data analytics on medical data (including so-called “Big Data”) to extract insights from large quantities of data.

His research has involved many applications, including not only areas such as software, electronics, robotics, communications, and finance but also more unexpected areas such as music and dance. He has been awarded nearly €11 million in research funding as Principal Investigator, including four prestigious SFI Investigator Awards. When collaborations are included, the total amount of funding he has been involved in is more than €58 million. He has published over 300 scientific papers and articles and has nine granted patents.

Conor won UL’s Excellence in Research Award in 2001 and again in 2018. He has graduated 18 PhD students and over 30 MSc students; his students have gone on to work both in Academia and high-tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Pinterest.