Prof. Owen Conlan is a Full Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Head of the Artificial Intelligence Discipline and 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. 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; ~3700 citations).

 

He is also a co-applicant, co-PI and Strand Leader of the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT research centre, where he leads the Digitally Enhanced Engagement strand which is underpinned by his research vision for proactive intelligent personalised agents.

 

 

AI agents supporting users in every day tasks, with a focus on personalisation, scrutability and control. This involves a number of elements: 1) understanding how human-agent interaction can facilitate effective shared models and control; 2) simulation of deployment of proactive intelligent personalised agents, specifically where there are varying degrees of adoption; 3) how personalisation is achieved, specifically with reference to agency, i.e. how does the agent decide what degree of autonomy it has when performing different actions and how does the user control this?