Dr P.J. Wall is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and a Lecturer at Technological University Dublin. He has been a member of ADAPT for many years, and has previously held the positions of Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow with the School of Computer Science & Statistics in TCD. Dr Wall holds various visiting Professor positions including with the University of Manchester and the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. He also teaches and collaborates with various other institutions such as Makerere University (Uganda), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), World Vision Ireland, Concern Worldwide, and the Development Studies Association of Ireland (DSA Ireland). 

Dr Wall is currently Principle Investigator for two Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Discover projects studying the ethical use of technology in school students’ lives. He is also Principle Investigator for both the ACADIGIA (Erasmus+) project and a Higher Education Authority (HEA) funded project on sustainability, technology & ethics in TCD. In addition, he leads the “AI, Ethics, and Technology” Special Interest Group in ADAPT, is a member of the steering committee of the DataEthics group in TCD, and is the Founder and Convener of the “Information, Technology, and Global Development” working group with DSA Ireland.

He has organised and chaired many international conferences and is currently the Senior Editor of the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC). He was nominated for the Provost’s Excellence in Teaching Award in TCD in 2019 and won the Education & Public Engagement Research Excellence Award with ADAPT in 2021. He was also awarded the Early Career Academics Award by Yale University in 2016 for his contributions to their Critical Realism Project.

Dr Wall’s primary research interests focus on AI and AI ethics – specifically the ethics of leveraging AI and other technologies to address sustainability challenges in different social and cultural contexts in both the Global North and the Global South. Another main focus of Dr Wall’s work is digital innovation for healthcare in the Global South and the ethics of using AI and mobile technologies in this context. His PhD work examined mobile and digital health (mHealth) interventions in Sierra Leone, where he explored and theorised the social, cultural, political and ethical aspects of implementing, using and scaling mHealth technologies in low-resource contexts.

Dr Wall is interested in supervising:
– Projects involving AI in various social, cultural and political contexts and an examination of the ethical implications of such projects (AI ethics).
– Projects examining sustainability and the application of AI and other technologies for addressing sustainability (in either/both the Global North or the Global South).
– Global Development projects focusing on mHealth or education (particularly projects based in Africa and the Global South).
– Other diverse projects involving data justice, AI ethics, technology ethics, the ethics of Global Development, AI standards and AI governance.
– Innovative use of research philosophy, theory and methodology – including indigenous theory and philosophical approaches originating from the Global South.