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Professor Declan O'Sullivan

Professor In (Computer Science)
7/9 STH LEINSTER ST
      
Profile Photo

Professor Declan O'Sullivan

Professor In (Computer Science)
7/9 STH LEINSTER ST

 Declan.OSullivan@tcd.ie

 3531896 3754


Declan O'Sullivan is a Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, joining Trinity College Dublin in 2001. He is a co-champion of the Trinity Digital Engagement interdisciplinary theme, and a Principal Investigator at the Research Ireland (Taighde Eireann) ADAPT Research Centre (http://www.adaptcentre.ie). He was Head of the Discipline of Artificial Intelligence from 2012-2018. He was Director of Research and Deputy Head of School from 2017 to 2023.

Declan was presented with an "Excellence in Supervision of Research Students" award from Trinity in 2024. He was also elected as a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin for the quality of his research and contribution to college in 2019. He was awarded a B.A. (Mod) in Computer Science from TCD in 1985, an M.Sc. in Computer Science from TCD in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from TCD in 2006. Declan has 13 years of research experience in industry, having worked for IONA Technologies from 1995 to 2001 and from 1988 to 1995 with Broadcom Eireann Research. During this time he achieved a successful track record as lead researcher, and in coordinating international research projects and the transfer of research into products.

He is currently primary supervisor for 6 Phd students: Matt Murtagh-White, Claire Mc Namara, Sarah Alzahrani, Ali Bandeh, Mary Sharp, Gaye Stephens.

He has supervised 28 Phd students to completion since 2006 as primary supervisor (21) or co-supervisor (7) : Jeffrey Sardina,; Jiantao Wu; Delaram Golpayegani; Albert Navarro; Alex Randles; Sinead Impey; Peru Bhardwaj, Lucy Mc Kenna; Harshvardhan Pandit; Gachpaz Hamed Roghaiyeh; Wessel Reijers; Haytham Assem; Ademar Crotti; Michael Glienecke; Alan Meehan; Brian Walsh; Hendrik Thomas; Seung-Hwa Chung; Paul Stynes; Liam Fallon; Wei Tai; Dominic Jones; Colm Conroy; Bo Fu; Aidan Boran; Song Guo; Ruairdhi Power; Karl Quinn, as well as the following 7 MSc by Research Theses completions : Rolando Hanlon, Sahil Mathur, Tewson Seeoun; Mark Stokell, Rami Shosha, Paul Mara and Austin Kenny. In addition he has supervised 65+ MSc Dissertations to date. Those he has supervised have continued their careers either as postdoctoral researchers in academia (with some now holding their own faculty positions) or by joining in a variety of technology companies and progressing into senior roles.
  Artificial Intelligence   DATA GOVERNANCE   Data Integration   DATA MAPPING   Knowledge Graphs   Linked Data   Semantic Interoperability   Semantic Mapping   Semantic Web
Project Title
 ADAPT: SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, www.adaptcentre.ie
From
2020
To
2026
Summary
SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, is pioneering human-centric AI techniques for digital content technologies, including natural language, speech and video processing, intelligent machine translation, virtual and augmented reality, and personalised human-agent interactive systems, complemented by research on transparent approaches to data governance, regulatory compliance and multistakeholder approaches to digital ethics.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Research Centre
Project Title
  Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, https://virtualtreasury.ie/
From
2017
To
2025
Summary
Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is an all-island and international collaborative research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Civil War on June 30th, 1922. The `Record Treasury" at the Public Record Office of Ireland stored seven centuries of Irish records dating back to the time of the Normans. Together with our 5 Core Archival Partners and over 40 other Participating Institutions in Ireland, Britain and the USA, we are working to recover what was lost in that terrible fire one hundred years ago. On the centenary of the Four Courts blaze at the end of June 2022, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland was launched online at https://virtualtreasury.ie/. Many millions of words from destroyed documents are linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections of our archival partners. This brings together a rich array of replacement items within an immersive 3-D reconstruction of the destroyed building.
Funding Agency
Government of Ireland Project Ireland 2040
Programme
Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.
Project Type
Digital Humanities
Project Title
 VOICES
From
2023
To
2028
Summary
VOICES aims to recover the voices and interrogate lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. Ireland formed part of the British, European and Atlantic world and women there responded to similar sets of transformative processes as other early modern women - proto- globalisation, state formation, confessionalisation, warfare, commercialisation, environmental change, and so on " which facilitates interrogation that is comparative, connected, and entangled. Two ambitious research questions underpin this pioneering project which focuses on Ireland as a case study. (1)What role did women play in a society undergoing profound economic, political, and cultural transformation? (2) What were their experiences of recurring social upheaval, bloody civil war and extreme trauma, especially sexual violence, and how have these been politicised? Our novel approach derives in large part from the interrogation of previously inaccessible historical data, now available digitally. This windfall is exceptional, but the resulting data is unstructured. Innovative technologies transform this unstructured data into knowledge that can be interrogated and visualised.
Funding Agency
European Union
Programme
ERC
Project Title
 Searobend, Linked Metadata for English-language texts, https://searobend.adaptcentre.ie/
From
2022
To
2024
Summary
The Searobend project " which takes its name from an Old English word meaning `clever linkage" " will use techniques from computer science to link fifteen major resources for the study of English texts from the High Middle Ages (c. 1000-1300), making much clearer how much survives and what proportion of this is available digitally. This will considerably enhance the utility of these resources for scholars and facilitate the next generation of research on this formative period of literary, linguistic and cultural history.
Funding Agency
Irish Research Council
Programme
Coalesce
Project Type
DIgital Humanities
Project Title
 FAIRVASC, building registry interoperability to inform clinical care, https://fairvasc.eu/
From
2019
To
2023
Summary
FAIRVASC uses semantic-web technologies to link vasculitis registries across Europe into a `single European dataset", and thus opens the door to new research into these challenging diseases. The programme ensures that all included registries are FAIR and that the infrastructure developed is aligned with developments in the European Joint Programme.
Funding Agency
European Vasculitis Society (EUVAS) and RITA European Reference Network
Programme
EJPRD

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Details Date
Member of National Coordination Committee of DARIAH-IE 2025 to date
External Examiner for TU Shannon MSc in Applied Software Engineering (MASE) 2020-2025
Member of Ireland's Open Data Governance Board (ODGB) 2019-2023
Member of Steering Group National Open Research Forum (NORF) 2019-2023
Member of Board of Marino Institute of Education 2019-2021
Expert Reviewer for French Research Agency 2015 to date
External Examiner for WIT Postgraduate Proposal Grant Awards 2014-to date
Expert Reviewer for National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil 2015-to date
Associate Editor of Journal of Network and Services Management 2009-to date
Associate Editor of International Journal of Network Management 2012-to date
External Examiner for MSc in Knowledge Management, Dublin Institute of Technology 2009-2012
External Examiner for BSc in Enterprise Computing, Dublin City University 2012-2016
Lucy McKenna, Declan O'Sullivan, Jane Ohlmeyer, Bronagh Ann McShane, Daniel Patterson, Digital Humanities and AI in Women"s History: The VOICES project (Ireland), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women's History., 2026, p1 - 20, Journal Article, IN_PRESS
Jeffrey Sardina, John D. Kelleher, Declan O'Sullivan, A Survey on Graph Structure and Knowledge Graph Embeddings, IEEE 19th International Conference on Semantic Computing, Laguna Hills,California, USA, 3-5 Feb 2025, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2025, pp1 - 10, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI  URL
Claire McNamara, Lucy Hederman, Declan O'Sullivan, Mind the Gap: LLMs, Competency Questions, and the Non-Technical User in the Humanities Domain, First Workshop on Users and Knowledge Graphs (UKG), SEMANTICS 2025, Vienna, Austria, 3 September 2025, 4064, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 13, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Sarah Alzahrani, Declan O'Sullivan, Guiding LLM Generated Mappings with Lifecycle-Based Metadata: An Early Evaluation, The Second Workshop on Knowledge Graphs and Neurosymbolic AI (KG-NeSy), SEMANTICS 2025, Vienna, Austria, 3 September 2025, 4064, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 7, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Diego Rincon-Yanez,Sabrina Senatore, Declan O'Sullivan, Scaling NeuroSymbolic AI integration for Seismic Event Detection, 22nd European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2025, Portoroz, Slovenia, June 1-5 2025, ESWC, 2025, pp1 - 1, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Sarah Alzahrani, Declan O'Sullivan, MetaSEMAP: Usability Evaluation for Metadata Annotation Across the Mapping Lifecycle, First Workshop on Users and Knowledge Graphs (UKG), SEMANTICS 2025, 4064, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 12, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Beyza Yaman, Michael Mackey, Peter Cautley, Declan O'Sullivan, Evaluating OpenSPG Engine for Network Operations, SEMANTiCS 2025, Vienna, Austria, 3-5 September 2025, 4064, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 6, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Orlando Abuanza Ubaque, Diego Rincon-Yanez, Declan O'Sullivan, Injecting Knowledge Graph Embeddings into RAG Architectures: Scalable Fact-Checking for Combating Disinformation with LLMs, Second International Workshop on Scaling Knowledge Graphs for Industry (SKGi 2025), Vienna, Austria, 3rd September 2025, 4064, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 6, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Proceedings of Second International Workshop on Scaling Knowledge Graphs for Industry (SKGi) - LLMs meet KGs in, editor(s)Diego Rincon-Yanez, Wilma Johanna Schmidt, Evgeny Kharlamov, Michael Cochez, Adrian Paschke, Declan O'Sullivan , Posters, Demos, Workshops, and Tutorials at SEMANTiCS 2025, Vienna, Austria, CEUR-WS, 2025, pp1 - 55, [Diego Rincon-Yanez, Wilma Johanna Schmidt, Evgeny Kharlamov, Michael Cochez, Adrian Paschke, Declan O'Sullivan], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED  URL
Matt Murtagh-White, P.J. Wall and Declan O'Sullivan, How Low Can We Go? Quantization Effects on LLM SPARQL Generation (Best Poster Nominee), The Semantic Web " 22nd European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2025, Portoroz, Slovenia,, June 1-5, 2025, ESWC, 2025, pp99 - 102, Poster, PUBLISHED  URL
  

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J. Keeney, D. Lynch, D. Lewis, D. O'Sullivan, On the Role of Ontological Semantics in Routing Contextual Knowledge in Highly Distributed Autonomic Systems, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, 2006, (Technical Report (TCD-CS-2006-15)), Report, PUBLISHED

  


Declan O'Sullivan and his team are developing new theoretical, conceptual and algorithmic techniques for automated data integration in dynamic environments. The integration step of the data lifecycle has typically been a labour intensive activity, with increasingly brittle results due to the dynamic nature of today's environments. A systematic mechanism for continuous data integration is lacking, but is needed to deal with the dynamism of the data (velocity, variety) and schemata characteristics of modern environments. The team has particular expertise in W3C-based Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web and Linked Data environments.