Since 1997, Alan Smeaton has been a Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he has previously been Head of School and Dean of Faculty. His early research covered the application of natural language processing techniques to information retrieval and this broadened to cover content-based retrieval of information in all media, text, image, audio and digital video.
Alan is co-founder and coordinator of TRECVid which, since 2001, has grown to be the largest worldwide multimedia benchmarking activity with about 80 participating research centres each year and over 1,150 individual researchers over the last decade. TRECVid is run by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. Alan has published over 500 refereed papers in journals, conferences or workshops, has almost 7,500 citations and a h-index of 42 (Google Scholar). Since 1987, he has personally secured over €13M in research funding from Irish and international funding agencies, and from industry. Since January 2006 he is PI, Co-PI or Collaborator on 38 individual funded projects.
In terms of conference organisation, Alan was host of ACM SIGIR in Dublin (1994), PC co-chair of SIGIR (Toronto, 2003), ICME (Amsterdam, 2005), MMM (Sophia Antipolis, 2009), iHCI (Dublin, 2010), CLEF (Padova, 2010), ICMR (Hong Kong, 2012), host of ESSIR (2005) and CIVR (2004).
He averages membership of between 12 and 15 international program committees annually. Alan was an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems for 8 years and was a member of the Editorial Board of Information Retrieval. He is currently a member of the boards for Information Processing and Management, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, and the ACM Journal on Computers and Cultural Heritage.
Alan has graduated 44 research M.Sc. and Ph.D. students and acted as external examiner for Ph.D. theses on more than 35 occasions. He has assisted the European Commission as an evaluator or reviewer for over 20 years with more than 30 specific review “missions”. During the last 10 years, Alan has carried out reviews of project proposals for the European Research Council, the National Science Foundation (US), National Research Councils in Australia, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK, Hong Kong, Ontario, the Niels Stensen Stiching (Netherlands), the Nuffield Foundation (UK), the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology, Enterprise Ireland, and Science Foundation Ireland.
In 2002 Alan Smeaton was awarded the DCU President’s award for “outstanding research carried out in the field of Science and Engineering” and in 2009 was awarded the DCU Educational Trust Leadership Circle award. In 2011 he was awarded the UK Information Group Tony Kent STRIX award for contribution to Information Retrieval. Alan Smeaton is a member of the ACM, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. In 2011 he was appointed by Minister Sherlock to the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, and in 2012 he was appointed by Minister Sherlock to the Irish Research Council.
