Director
Professor Conor Ryan is a Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Limerick. He was awarded his PhD in Genetic Programming, a style of Machine Learning, in 1996 and was the inventor, along with two of his PhD students, of Grammatical Evolution in 1998. Grammatical Evolution is the most commonly used non-patented Evolutionary Automatic Programming system in the world and has spawned thousands of publications since its inception.
Conor was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in 2013-2014 and is currently the Fulbright Ambassador for the University of Limerick. He holds several granted patents in the use of Machine Learning to extend the life and reliability of Flash Memory and Solid State Disks (SSDs) and was the co-founder of two companies, Evolvability and NVMdurance, both of which were located in Limerick.
In addition to working with Lero, Conor is a Funded Investigator with EMPOWER and also collaborates with the Limerick Digital Cancer Research Centre . He has won many Best Paper awards, is a Senior Member of the IEEE and, in 2021, won the Evo* Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe.
Conor established the BDS research group in 2001 and has been the director since its establishment. The BDS has received funding from Enterprise Ireland, the Science Foundation of Ireland and Horizon Europe, and it regularly collaborates with companies such as Intel, Huawei, and Fidelity. Along with various industrial and academic collaborators, the group has secured over €60 million in funding. It has graduated 19 PhD and more than 50 MSc students since its establishment and consistently maintains a diverse membership of 20-25 individuals from ten different countries.