Professor Alan Smeaton

Since 1997, Alan Smeaton has been a Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he has been Head of School and Dean of Faculty. His early research interests covered the application of natural language processing techniques to text-based information retrieval but this then broadened to cover the indexing and content-based retrieval of information in all media, text, image, audio and especially digital video. The focus of his work now is in information access for human digital memory applications, applications of the sensor web, and benchmarking content-based video applications. Alan Smeaton is the co-founder and a coordinator of TRECVid which, since 2001, has grown to be the largest worldwide multimedia benchmarking activity with about 80 participating research centres each year.  In terms of conference organisation, Alan was host of SIGIR in Dublin (1994), co-chair of SIGIR (2003), co-chair or ICME (2005), co-chair of MMM (2009), host of ESSIR (2005) and general chair of CIVR in Dublin (2004). He has published over 250 refereed publications, was an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems for 8 years and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Information Retrieval, Information Processing and Management, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, the ACM Journal on Computers and Cultural Heritage and of the Journal on Digital Libraries.

He has graduated over 30 M.Sc. and PhD research students and has acted as external examiner for PhD theses on almost 30 occasions. He has assisted the European Commission as an evaluator or reviewer in the ESPRIT, LRE, Language Engineering, Information Engineering, MLAP, LTR, INCO-Copernicus and IST FP5 and FP6 programmes as well as acting as a project reviewer for many specific projects. In 2002 Alan Smeaton was awarded the DCU President's award for "outstanding research carried out in the field of Science and Engineering".

Alan has also carried out reviews for the EPSRC (UK), Enterprise Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, the Australian Research Council, the Austrian Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Nuffield Foundation, the National Science Foundation (US), the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong, the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK), all within the last four years alone.

Alan Smeaton is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society and is a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society.

For more information, visit Alans homepage.