Professor Tony Fagan is the Winner of the Irish Academy of Engineering Parsons Medal for Engineering Sciences
Tuesday, 17 January, 2017
The Winner of the Irish Academy of Engineering Parsons Medal for Engineering Sciences, 2016 is Professor Tony Fagan of the UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Professor Fagan’s field of excellence is Digital Signal Processing (DSP), a discipline crucial to the modern world of high-speed communications, the internet, multimedia content and modern medical imaging.
The technology of digital signal processing (DSP) and the associated advanced mathematical calculation methods needed within it may be unknown or invisible to most of us but has affected our modern lives very substantially. It has enabled speeds of information transmission that are more than a million times faster than was possible, for example, with the Telex service that was developed in the 1940’s and remained in common use until the 1980’s.
If you watch television, connect to the Internet, use a digital camera, make a cell phone call, drive a car, type on the keyboard of a home computer, or use a charge or debit card, you are taking advantage of DSP - the technical brains in all those devices.
Through his far-seeing establishment in the early 1980’s of a research group based at the UCD School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Professor Fagan has been prominent in creating a high-tech DSP ecosystem in Ireland and Dublin now has a “DSP Valley” that is the envy of many high-tech regions elsewhere.
From the time that DSP was in its infancy Tony made sure that Ireland was participating strongly in the development and exploitation of this essential technology. Thanks to his foresight and hard work there are now several Irish companies that proudly walk the world stage supplying highly innovative DSP solutions to the global communications and medical device industries.
Professor Fagan has achieved this by contributing some innovative ideas that were derived from his advanced engineering research. Also, he has enabled many important industry-based developments directly and through his education and mentoring of a substantial number of engineers to PhD level and higher.
The presentation will take place at an Irish Academy of Engineering Dinner to be held in the R.D.S., Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 on Friday, October 28th, 2016.