Professor Alan Smeaton named as Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

DCU’s Professor Alan Smeaton has been awarded the highest possible honour by the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity for his outstanding contributions to multimedia indexing and retrieval.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has awarded Professor Smeaton a fellowship, the highest grade of membership which is conferred upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishment in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

Professor Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University and one of the founding Directors of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, funded by Science Foundation Ireland. He joins only fourteen IEEE Fellows in Ireland to date.

Professor Smeaton is one of Ireland’s most prolific published researchers and is the joint co-ordinator of TRECVid, the largest worldwide benchmarking evaluation of content-based analysis of video, which he founded in 2001. He is also a member of the Board of the Irish Research Council and a member of the Scientific Committee of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), an EU funding program with a budget of €300m in Horizon 2020.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity and is the foremost authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computer and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

Last year, Professor Smeaton was also awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal in the Engineering Sciences, an award presented to one individual, every three years.

President of Dublin City University, Professor Brian MacCraith said: 

"On behalf of the whole community at DCU, I would like to extend sincere congratulations to Alan on this wonderful achievement. Being awarded a Fellowship of the IEEE is a global recognition of excellence in a highly competitive field and is a testament to Alan's high quality contributions over decades of impactful research."

Prof Alan Hanjalic of Delft University of Technology, an IEEE Fellow and one of Prof Smeaton’s nominators said: “I have known Alan for more than a decade and have had the pleasure of following his continuous and tremendous contribution to the field of multimedia information retrieval. As a scientific pioneer and international research leader, he has inspired many of us and created immense impact in computer science and beyond.”