I am a Senior Lecturer in Electronic Engineering in DCU. My primary degree is in theoretical physics, awarded by Trinity College Dublin, in 1985 and my PhD is from Dublin City University, awarded in 1993. From 1985 to date, I have been employed in the School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, in various academic capacities.

I have eighteen years experience of teaching, course/module development, programme development, assessment/examination, project supervision and student counselling/support, at undergraduate and at postgraduate levels. I have been a significant innovator in areas such as course materials, course presentation, assessment, and student support. I have provided leadership and support to facilitate colleagues in benefiting from such innovations. I have previously served as the Chair of Programme for the MEng/Graduate Diploma Programme in Electronic Systems and the BEng Programme in Digital Media Engineering in the School of Electronic Engineering, and as Chair of the Teaching Committee of the Academic Council of DCU. I have been involved in various third-level educational initiatives at a national level, am external examiner for the Postgraduate Diploma in Computers for Engineers in TCD and am external examiner for the undergraduate engineering programme in Electronics and Software in the University of Ulster, Jordanstown.

My PhD thesis was on an information theoretic approach to visual perception. I have been active in postgraduate research supervision since the early 1990s, with successful involvement in TELTEC-DCU and a founding role in RINCE. With a colleague, Dr Sean Marlow, I supervised the TELTEC-DCU activities in Video Compression that contributed significantly to the MoMuSys and DICEMAN EU projects and also to the ISO MPEG-4 standard definition. Myself, Sean Marlow and latterly Dr Noel O'Connor have represented Ireland on the COST 211 actions since 1991, now succeeded by COST292, and are the principals in the Irish component of the FP5 SCHEMA Network of Excellence.

I belong to the management team of the Centre for Digital Video Processing, DCU, directed by Prof Alan Smeaton, which has extensive experience in the management of medium- to large-sized research projects in receipt of funding from Irish and European funding agencies, and has a record of submitting deliverables on time and completing projects within budget. I am the technical liaison between the CDVP and their first commercial spinoff, Aliope Ltd.

Over the past eight years, my colleagues and I in the CDVP have received research funding from the National Software Directorate of the IDA, Enterprise Ireland (Miller Funding), the Enterprise Ireland Informatics Programme, Enterprise Ireland RIF (2002-2004), Enterprise Ireland ATRP2002, Enterprise Ireland CFTD (2003), EU FP6 (aceMedia IP), Science Foundation Ireland, the EU Marie Curie Programme, the DELOS Network of Excellence, the IST SCHEMA Network of Excellence, Sun Microsystems, Parthus, the Teaching and Learning Fund in DCU, the Research Committee in DCU, the School of Electronic Engineering DCU and RINCE. I am the principal investigator on the Enterprise Ireland CFTD MEDIASSIST project on tools for organizing, browsing and retrieving from a personal electronic picture collection. For more information on the CDVP's activities, including publications and ongoing projects, see www.cdvp.dcu.ie.

Apart from research applications in the area of digital media and multimedia information retrieval I am interested in the fundamental problem of understanding visual understanding and in applying mathematical tools such as category theory to further this understanding.

I have been involved in organising various national and international workshops and conferences, including WIAMIS and IMVIP, and CIVR 2004 to be held in DCU in July 2004. I have been a reviewer for a selection of international journals, including IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems for Video Processing, IEEE Transactions on Communications, ACM Transactions on Image Processing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems and IEE Proceedings on Vision, Image and Signal Processing. I have also been a reviewer for national and international conferences, including WIAMIS, SIGIR, ICIP, IDSPCC and IMVIP. I have been an evaluator for the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership scheme and the Science Foundation Ireland Investigator Awards. I am currently Deputy Chair of the DCU Research Advisory Panel. I am a member of the IEEE.

Subjects taught to date include: