Professor Owen Conlan

I am a Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Head of the Artificial Intelligence Discipline and Co-director of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities. I am an active member of the Artificial Intelligence discipline and of the Knowledge and Data Engineering (KDEG) research group, having previously acted as its director. In 2015, I was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, which represents the highest honour the university can bestow on its academic staff. I am a recognised thought leader in the field of personalisation (220+ publications; h-index of 30; ~3800 citations), promoting new creative approaches to personalisation, specifically the multi-model, metadata driven approach, the cross-site personalisation approach, the four-phase approach for explorative personalisation and approaches to support metacognition and self-regulation. I am also at the forefront of promoting comparative evaluation techniques in the personalisation research field. It is a mark of prestige that I was selected as the general chair of the leading international conference in the field, User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalisation (UMAP), in 2015. I was also general chair of Hypertext 2021 and will be general chair of ACMs Web Conference in 2027. I have secured approximately €10.8m in competitive research and industry funding as principal investigator and I have an extensive network of international multi-disciplinary collaborators through the European Commission projects I have coordinated and in which I performed scientific leadership roles. I am also one of seven founding PIs of ADAPT, a €50 million (co-funded by 25+ industry partners and Science Foundation Ireland) Global Centre of Excellence for Digital Content Technology, led from Trinity College Dublin. I lead a multi-disciplinary team of 10 researchers in the Personalising the User Experience theme of ADAPT. I am a passionate educator, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, with a strong record in developing innovative programmes and modules. I am very much student-centric and am engaged with all facets of developing students, from recruitment (e.g. visiting schools to promote Computer Science) through to supporting students to navigate College policies (e.g. facilitating appeals processes). The goal of my lab is to empower users in understanding and interacting with complex knowledge and media. I have a specific focus on user control over personalised AI-driven systems.

  Applied information systems   Artificial Intelligence   Cognitive science   Computer based training   Databases, database management, data mining   Distance Learning   Educational Psychology   E-Learning   Information management   Information Representations   Information Science/Systems   Information systems development   Information Technology   Information technology in education   Innovation in learning   Internet   Internet technologies   Knowledge Acquisition   Knowledge and data engineering   KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING   Knowledge Management   Knowledge Representation   LEARNING   Lifelong Learning   Neuroscience and Cognition   Virtual learning environments