Professor Owen Conlon

Prof. Owen Conlan is a Full Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Statistics and is the Co-director of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities. He is recognised as an international leader in the area of personalisation research. The vision that underpins his research is: advancing knowledge-based, visualisation and artificial intelligence techniques to support improved human cognition, engagement and understanding of complex information. His current work focusses on proactive personalisation, where autonomous intelligent digital assistants act on user’s behalf. He has brought leadership to field of personalisation (e.g. General Chair of UMAP 2015 and Hypertext 2021) and has made a significant scholarly contribution to the field (190+ publications; h-index of 29; ~3300 citations). He has secured approximately €10.8m in competitive research and industry funding as principal investigator and has an extensive network of international multi-disciplinary collaborators through the European Commission projects he has coordinated and in which he performed both coordinator and scientific leadership roles. Owen is 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. He is also a co-applicant, co-PI and Strand Leader of the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT research centre and in the recently awarded ADAPT II proposal (securing a further €32 million in funding for the centre from 2021 to 2026). Owen leads the Digitally Enhanced Engagement strand in ADAPT which is underpinned by his research vision for personalised proactive agency, with a responsibility for a budget of over €5 million (representing a third of the centre’s research platform budget). He supports a team of twelve researchers and has successfully supervised seventeen PhD candidates to completion. Owen also has significant experience collaborating with industry partners, having worked with Huawei, Mazda, Deutsche Bank, and over 15 other industry partners. Owen has also brought his research to market having supported three successful spin-out, which were underpinned by three international patent applications.