Professor Noel O'Connor

Noel E. O’Connor graduated from Dublin City University (DCU) with a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering (1992) and a PhD (1998), after working for 2 years as a research assistant for Teltec Ireland at DCU. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering at DCU and a Principal Investigator (PI) in CLARITY, with responsibility for RP4: Contextual Content Analysis.

Prof. O’Connor’s early research was in the field of video compression, specifically object-based compression in the context of MPEG-4, which subsequently led to an interest in video object segmentation and tracking as well as other aspects of computer vision. With the advent of MPEG-7, he became interested in audio-visual (AV) analysis for content-based information retrieval as well as low-power configurable hardware for AV processing, a key-enabler for next generation context-aware multimedia sensors. He has a long track record of contributing to international standardization. He was the Irish representative to the world-wide ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) standards body. He acted as integrator for the software implementation of MPEG-4 that now forms an informative annex to the standard and was part of a small team whose technology proposal to MPEG-7 was selected as the starting point for the standard. The focus of his current research is in multi-modal content analysis leveraging mutually complementary sensor data sources, for applications in sports and health, ambient assisted living and environmental monitoring.

Since 1999 Prof. O’Connor has published over 160 peer-reviewed publications, made 11 standards submissions, filed 5 patents and spun off a campus company, Aliope Ltd (with Prof. Alan Smeaton). He has graduated 13 PhD students and 3 Masters students. He has edited 6 journal special issues, including Signal Processing: Image Communication, Multimedia Tools and Applications, the Journal of Web Semantics and the Journal of Embedded Systems. He has  acted as Programme Co-Chair for 4 international conferences, CIVR 2009, SAMT 2006, WIAMIS 2007 and CIVR 2004. He was Content Track Chair for ICME 2008 and Tutorial/Workshop Chair for SAMT 2009, CBMI 2009 and SAMT 2008. He is a member of the Academic Steering Committee of the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge series, run in conjunction with ACM Multimedia. He has delivered keynote lectures at a number of  international PhD Summer schools including SSMS 2009, SSMS 2008, SSMS 2007 and ESSIR 2005. He has acted as an expert reviewer for the EU FP6 PROFI project (FET Open STREP) and the EU FP7 VITALAS  and PrestoPrime Integrated Projects, as well as acting as an expert evaluator for EU FP6 Calls 2 and 4 and FP7 Call 3. He is a member of IEEE, Engineers Ireland and the IET.