Alan Smeaton and the wonders of data analytics

Professor Alan Smeaton was not expected to be an innovator, or an academic. As a young man, he did well in school but his family background didn’t indicate that a university education would be his path. The presumption, that the eldest boy to a widowed mother, would go out and get a job to help support the family lay in wait. But, Alan Smeaton decided to break the template, and in his final year of secondary school, he told his mother he wanted to go to university: “She said, can you get a good job and make money, I said I can, and off I went for four years.”

Today, Alan Smeaton is a professor of computing at DCU and since 1991, he has graduated almost thirty M.Sc. and PhD research students. His current title conveys only one side of a man who has been at the forefront of R&D in the field of data analytics for over 30 years. He has hundreds of peer reviewed papers accredited to him, is a founding director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, which involves the work of 400 researchers based in several institutions, including DCU.

It’s difficult to place an age badge on Smeaton, his is a big presence, with an easy self-depreciating humour, and bright eyes which show evidence of a man who likes to laugh.

“I went to UCD to do Physics, and there was this new subject called computer science, I said I will take that, I liked it more than physics. It was different back then, it wasn’t like now where students have the flexibility to change modules. And, I found something that suited me,” he said.

Smeaton applies data science through analytics to: “More or less anything. I have collaborated with almost every department in DCU, including a programme with the nursing school to aid memory recollection in people with dementia.”

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