Dr. Kealan McCusker
Dr Kealan McCusker received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Manchester in 1994. Following a year mainly spent teaching science and mathematics to school children, he return to University to obtain a M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from Queen's University Belfast, graduating in 1996. After graduating, he worked from 1997 until 2002 for Parthus Technology Ltd and was employed as a application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer where he was exposed to the full chip design cycle. In 2003 he worked as an independent contractor for Texas Instruments in Nice, France. He had responsibility for Static timing analysis and synthesis of a personal digital assistant chip.
On returning to Ireland he decided to enrol in a Ph.D. program run by the Centre for Digital and Video Processing (CDVP) in DCU under the supervision of Prof. Noel O'Connor. In 2007 he completed his Ph.D. in the study of identity based cryptography (IBC) as a possible solution for distributing symmetric keys in a wireless sensor network. This work involved the design and implementation in an ASIC of a hardware accelerator for IBC. The work was accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC).
Since 2007 he has been employed as a post doctoral researcher in the CDVP primarily concerned with translational research. He first worked on an Enterprise Ireland project which involved the implementation of a hardware accelerator for background suppression. The solution was targeted at computationally constrained devices such as a smart phone. The team developed a prototype platform around an ARM processor and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that demonstrated the technology that was developed. His next project was based in the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) and it investigated exergaming, specifically using a smart phone as the game console. His role, among other tasks, was to implement a computer vision server and object recognition on the mobile platform using the Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm. The current project that he works on, also based in the NDRC, is investigating video and audio analysis technology to create deep, structured metadata for moving image assets.
From 2005 until 2009 he was the module coordinator of Digital Electronic Systems. A course that introduces to the student modern digital design and implementation practises such as using hardware description languages. His responsibilities involved developing and delivering course content, setting examinations and supervising project work.