Conor Ryan Editor & Author

Conor Ryan is Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Limerick where he is director of the Biocomputing and Developmental Systems Group. His background includes the development of Machine Learning algorithms and their application to industrial scale problems such as medicine and microelectronics, and he holds several patents in the area of non-volatile memory. He was previously a Fulbright Scholar in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in 2013 and is also CTO of software at NVMdurance, a company that uses Machine Learning to extend the endurance of Flash Memory.

 Michael O'Neill holds the ICON Chair of Business Analytics at University College Dublin, and is Associate Dean - Director of the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. He is a founding Director of the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group and has over 300 publications on genetic programming, natural computing and their application in areas such as telecommunications networks, creativity, design, engineering, business analytics and finance.  He has co-authored four monographs including Grammatical Evolution (2003),  Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling (2006), Foundations in Grammatical Evolution for Dynamic Environments (2009), and Natural Computing Algorithms (2015).

 J.J. Collins holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Queen Mary University of London. He is lecturer in the department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick, and is currently working on a higher research degree in the area of Evolutionary Computation.  His background includes computer vision, robotic mapping and localisation, minimisation of perceptual aliasing in reinforcement learning agents, and synthesis of algorithms using evolutionary paradigms. He was a core contributor to the design of the first Masters in Artificial Intelligence in Ireland in 2017. For J.J., the allure of the field of artificial intelligence, and the evolutionary paradigm in particular, has grown stronger over the years.