Professor Declan O'Sullivan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.