Karl Flannery, Chairman ISA, Professor Barry Smyth and Philip Sharpe, Irish Software Innovation Network.
Professor Barry Smyth, who holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science in UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, has received the Irish Software Association's 2012 Outstanding Academic Achievement of the Year Award.
Professor Smyth was presented with his award at the 35th annual Irish Software Association Awards ceremony held in Dublin which was attended by over 400 people. The theme of this year’s awards ceremony was ‘Innovating, Transforming, Scaling’.
Professor Smyth has published in excess of 400 research papers and received more than 20 Best Paper awards for his research at University College Dublin. His research interests include personalization, recommender systems, case-based reasoning, machine learning and information retrieval.
Over recent years he has secured in excess of €15 million in research funding from a variety of Irish, European, and US funding agencies. During this time he has developed a leading research group in the area of personalization and recommender systems technologies, graduating over 20 postgraduate students, many at PhD level.
On receiving the Award Professor Smyth said, “It is a great honour to receive this award and recognition from my peers. I have always believed that there is enormous potential for collaboration between academia and industry. Some of the most challenging and exciting problems are faced by industry every day and it is has been a great privilege to work with such a wide range of companies over the years.”
Professor Smyth is also the Director of the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a SFI funded CSET (Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology) and a joint initiative between University College Dublin, Dublin City University and the Tyndall National Institute.
Congratulating Professor Smyth on receiving this prestigious award, Professor Peter Clinch, UCD Vice-President for Innovation said, “Professor Smyth’s academic, entrepreneurial and industry partnership track record demonstrates that it is possible to achieve excellence in research and scholarly publications and at the same time maximise the commercialisation of research output, through the establishment of spin-out companies, and to form collaborative partnerships with industry, which benefit the economy and society.”
In addition Professor Smyth is a serial entrepreneur. He was a co-founder of the UCD spin-out company ChangingWorlds Ltd., a leading provider of mobile content discovery solutions, which was acquired by Amdocs Inc in 2008 for in excess of $60 million.
He is also the co-founder of another UCD spin-out HeyStaks, the social web-search start-up which he established with Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs in 2008. HeyStaks is based at NovaUCD, the Centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs at University College Dublin. Professor Smyth has worked with a wide range of industry partners including Vodafone, Givaudan, Amdocs, and SkillPages.
Speaking at the Awards ceremony, Karl Flannery, Chairman, ISA and CEO Storm Technology said, “Our future as an industry is all about international scaling, and it is being written in software by the companies represented by ISA. We represent a community of category-winning scaling companies that want to transform, or even disrupt, the markets in which they operate to create the industries of the future.”
The other winners included The Now Factory (Technical Innovation of the Year and Sales Achievement of the Year); SAP (MNC Initiative of the Year); Openet (Company of the Year); James Whelton and Bill Liao, CoderDojo (Persons of the Year); FeedHenry (Partnership of the Year) and Big Fish Game (Games Company of the Year).
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