Prof. Noel O'Connor
Prof. Noel E. O’Connor is a Full Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland. He is Director of Rinn Artificial Intelligence, one of seven centres launched as part of Research Ireland’s enhanced national research network. Backed by a €121.7 million government investment, Rinn AI includes 15 Research Performing Organisations (RPOs)—all 13 of Ireland's universities, a research institute, and an institute of technology—combining the talents of over 288 co-applicants and PIs. From 2019 to 2026, Noel was CEO of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, an SFI-funded research centre. From 2014 to 2017, he was Academic Director of DCU’s Research and Enterprise Hub on Information Technology and the Digital Society, responsible for coordinating multidisciplinary ICT-related research across the university.
The focus of Noel’s research is in multimodal content analysis for applications in autonomous vehicles, environmental monitoring, health and human performance, medical imaging, multimedia content-based retrieval, and security/safety. Since 1999, he has published over 600 peer-reviewed publications, made 11 standards submissions, and filed 6 patents. His commercial experience includes a successful spin-out company and the mentorship of two others. He was previously an Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication (Elsevier) and ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, and has acted as General Chair and Programme Chair for several high-ranking conferences.
Noel collaborates widely with international researchers from Arizona State University (USA), Oregon Health & Science University (USA), Rutgers University (USA), the University of New England (Australia), The University of British Columbia (Canada), the University of California, Irvine (USA), the University of Oldenburg (Germany), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), and many others. In 2010, Noel was awarded the DCU President’s Research Award for Science and Engineering, as well as Enterprise Ireland’s National Commercialisation Award for ICT.
Research Interests
Professor O’Connor’s early research was in the field of video compression, specifically object-based compression in the context of MPEG-4, which subsequently led to an interest in video object segmentation and tracking as well as other aspects of computer vision. Following the advent of MPEG-7, he became interested in audio-visual (AV) analysis for content-based information retrieval as well as low-power configurable hardware for AV processing. As his research became increasingly multi-disciplinary he developed research interests in the Internet of Things, including both instrumented environments and next generation wearable sensors. The focus of his current research is in multi-modal content analysis leveraging mutually complementary sensor data sources, for applications in sports and health, digital media, ambient assisted living and environmental monitoring.