I am a professor of Machine Learning. We build computers that can learn how to solve problems and write their own code.

I have travelled all over the world and lived in America for a while, in Texas and Boston. Boston is great because they all love Ireland!

I play Dungeons and Dragons, am a drummer and really, really like driving fast cars.

Introduction

Machine Learning is the collective name for a set of algorithms that enable computers to think for themselves. Basically, they process a bunch of data which is in the form of inputs and outputs, for example, imagine we had a list of student grades in the pre-Leaving Cert, and then the total number of points they got when they actually did their Leaving.

A Machine Learning system could analyse this data and produce a model or program that maps or guesses how to predict their final number of points from the Leaving based solely on their pre-Leaving.

Training a Machine Learning model

Next, we could use that model to predict how many other points students next year will get based on their pre-Leaving results.

What can it do?

If you’ve got data on it, we can make predictions. For example, how does Netflix know what films you like?

Conor’s movie recommendations from Netflix’s Machine Learning system

Yep, Machine Learning. They look the films you watched (the input data) and predict what you’ll think of other movies.

Flash Memory

Flash memory is the kind of computer memory in mobile phones and USB sticks. It’s very fast, but, believe it or not, it wears out. When it does, it forgets what is stored on it, and all your favourite photos and videos disappear.

The faster it is, the quicker it wears out and more power it uses. What makes things even more complicated is that different phones and computers need flash configured differently in order to make it work as best it can. This is a really complex problem that no one has quite figured out to do.

My company, NVMdurance, used Machine Learning to automatically set up flash for a specific use case (a phone, or a computer being used in a bank, or a data centre).

Last year my postgraduate students (students who already have degrees and are now studying for Masters or Doctorates) created an online workshop that we ran during Science Week. Over 500 students attended and it was a great success.

I would use the money to help build some software that we could give to the schools participating in this year’s one, so that it would be even more interactive.