About Us

The BDS Group

Biocomputing and Development Systems, University of Limerick

Our Story

Origins in Grammatical Evolution

The Biocomputing and Development Systems (BDS) Group is a multi-disciplinary research group at the University of Limerick working with cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools. We are based in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS), and are part of Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.

BDS is led by Prof. Conor Ryan, who in 1998, together with two of his PhD students, invented Grammatical Evolution, an evolutionary automatic programming technique that has since been adopted by researchers across science and engineering worldwide. That original insight remains at the heart of much of the group's work today, even as our research has grown to span explainable AI, digital circuit design, computational healthcare, and human-robot interaction.

Meet the Director
The BDS research group at the University of Limerick, with Prof. Conor Ryan seated at the centre
Funding

€57 million+

Secured over the group's history with international partners from industry, academia, and research bodies.

Affiliation

Lero

Part of Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, and the CSIS Department at UL.

Leadership

Prof. Conor Ryan

Director of BDS and co-inventor of Grammatical Evolution.

Read his profile
Where we work

University of Limerick

The University of Limerick (Irish: Ollscoil Luimnigh) is a public research university in Limerick, Ireland. Founded in 1972 as the National Institute for Higher Education, Limerick, it was conferred university status in 1989, the first new university established in Ireland since independence in 1922.