Dr. Ciaran Mc Goldrick

An Engineer and Academic, Ciarán Mc Goldrick is an Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin's School of Computer Science and Statistics. His research spans communications, energy, security and scholarship. He focuses on questions such as: How will future devices and systems work, as opposed to how do todays devices operate? Ciarán holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering, with specialisms in Control and Signal and Image Processing. He has been a tenured academic in Trinity College Dublin for more than 17 years, and has also held visiting appointments in UCLA. His research is, and has been, supported by National and International Awards, and he is an also an active advocate for professionalism and excellence in learning and scholarship.

  Communication Sciences   Communication Systems   Communications engineering   Computational mathematics, discrete mathematics   Computer Engineering   Computer Hardware   Computer Science   Computer Simulation/Modeling   Computer Software   Computer Vision   Computer vision and robotics   Computer/Data/Network Security   Control Applications (Computer Sciences)   Control Theory (Computer Sciences)   Cryptography   Cryptography and coding theory   Cryptology   Data protection, storage technology, cryptography   Distributed systems   Electrical Engineering   Electronic commerce,Payment, Signature   Gateways   Harmonic Analysis, Wavelets   Image Processing   Imaging and Computer Vision   Imaging, image processing   Information Technology   Information/Communication Systems   Internet technologies   Local Area Networks   Location Based Services   Microelectronics   MOBILE   Mobile Applications   MOBILE COMMUNICATION   Mobile Communications   Mobile Computing   Mobile Networks   Mobile Positioning   MOBILE RADIO   MOBILE RADIO SYSTEMS   MOBILE-RADIO   Network Positioning   Network technology, Security   Networking   Networks and telecommunications research   Pattern Recognition   Queuing   Satellite, Technology, Systems, Positioning, Communication   Signal Analysis   Signal processing   Software Engineering   Surveillance Systems   Telecommunication Engineering   Telecommunications   Telecommunications Policy   Telecommunications Research   Wireless Communication Systems   Wireless Sensor Networks   Wireless systems, Radio technology

Getting mobile, energy constrained, wireless devices and systems to meaningfully communicate, and to reliably and securely transmit and route data to each other, can be extremely difficult. Devices have to be in physical communication range, need to know how to autonomously discover each other, negotiate and agree on common purpose and goals. I have been active in constrained communications and the Internet of Things for more than two decades[9-12,15,19,62] and have contributed some fundamental open source platforms and systems[10,48,51,55] that remain in active use today. I have targeted fundamental communication and online control challenges in autonomous vehicles (terrestrial, drones and underwater) and for offshore wind and wave energy devices[9,12,15,21,27,31,35]. My research in cryptography was catalysed by the need to robustly secure these new online control and actuation metaphors I created. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) primitives enable operations to be carried out on encrypted data (ciphertext), generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, is equivalent to the result of performing the same operations on the original text. My attribute based formulations uniquely enable selectivity in the access and operations on the ciphertext[2-8,28]. This approach removes the need for expensive interactions with centralised key infrastructures and, implicitly, ameliorates privacy and data compromise concerns[20,24]. Recently I have extended focus to quantum cryptography, informed by my HE work, and also to investigating how and where fundamental transforms, and their generalisations, find expression and purpose in a quantum information science setting. A desire to understand how students learn, and how to best communicate complex networking and cryptography concepts, inspires and informs my research in STEM Education[16-18,22,33,45,47,58-61]. This has resulted in my research-led modules and course conceptualisations being adopted internationally e.g. in Stanford and UCLA. It complements my more technical research activities and is an integral part of me being an academic, and indeed to being a Fellow - to "foster scholarship, research and teaching". My standing, and internationally adopted contributions and innovations, has led to an invited Visiting Professor position in UCLA (then a top 10 Computer Science Department globally), Vice Chair roles on EC funding award programmes, and regular expert, speaker and international funding review invitations. I am a recipient of an Irish "Champion of EU Research" award. Beyond this strong recognition of my international standing, my activities are highly aligned with TCD's research themes, core values and intrinsic purpose, and more broadly with Irish and EC strategic priorities in research and scholarship. I have been PI on two EC MSCA grants and coordinated one; I have also been funded by both Enterprise Ireland and SFI. My grant involvement to date has been ~€5.6M, of which I am directly responsible for winning ~€1.73M. My h-index is 16, and my works have attracted over 1000 citations. I have published 1 edited volume, 5 book chapters, 11 journal papers, and >50 peer reviewed conference papers. Much of my more recent work is substantive and significant in Computer Science terms, with small author sets, high rigour, intricate complexity and clear originality and contribution.