Biography
Dr Mairtín Cunneen is an Associate Professor in Data Analytics and Risk Governance in the Accounting and Finance Dept. in the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick.For many years, his research has focused on developing innovative analytical methods, Data Commercialisation and AI. He has a deep personal and academic interest in the philosophy of AI, language theory and AI Ethics and Governance.
Dr Cunneen is the course director of the Kemmy Business School's Machine Learning in Finance MSc and GradDiploma in AI in Finance. Furthermore, for several years his Data Risk, Ethics, and Governance modules have been part of UL's strategic industry-focused MSc programs, including Ireland's National AI MSc and the MSc in Business Analytics.
Dr Cunneen focuses on investigating the growth, commercialisation and science of Data Analytics in terms of broader societal relations, risk, ethics and governance. A key component is to practice research-led teaching and to engage students with research questions and topics relating to:
- AI Governance, Risk & Ethics
- Tech Governance Theory
- Explainable AI (XAI)
- Algorithmic Bias
- Black Box decision making
- Data Profiling
- Data Commercialisation and business models
- Autonomous Vehicle Decision making
- InsurTech
- AI Assistants (Language theory & NLP)
He is also interested in AI and technology for social good, especially innovation, to support climate risk mitigation. He has completed two funded EU Horizon projects on Autonomous Vehicles and researched machine decisionality (2016-2020). He has also worked on and carried out research on Data Forensics, AI tools and anti-terrorism and fraud as part of the Anti-FinTer EU-funded Horizon project on "Versatile artificial intelligence investigative technologies for revealing online cross-border financing activities of terrorism." (2021-23)
Dr Cunneen is a LERO Funded Investigator (FI) and Co-PI on the national EMPOWER Science Foundation Ireland's project on Data Governance: "The research will focus on developing a data ecosystem that benefits all users while defining and safeguarding the rights of data sharers." (2022-2025)
Dr Cunneen is the University of Limerick's Principal Investigator on the Horizon Europe-funded project XTREME (2024-2027) on developing mixed reality for Art and Creativity. As part of the project, a Living Lab with several Ph.D.s and Postdocs working on the project is based in the Kemmy Business School. The focus of the Living Lab is to assess how to develop a more humancentric and ethical mixed reality.
Research Interests
- Research interests
Dr Martin Cunneen investigates the societal impacts of Machine Intelligence applications under the umbrella of Data Analytics, AI, ML and Robotics. His research focuses on the challenge to anticipate and provide informed and timely 'Governance' instruments in response to commercial applications of these technologies. With years of professional tech sector experience from sustainable technology initiatives, EdTech, and community programming projects, to Big Data, his research continually examines the complexities of socio-technological relations. In developing his research, he has fashioned unique frameworks to support multi-stakeholder engagement in socio-technological risk and ethics. His research is also backed by years of teaching applied ethics, analytical philosophy, and philosophy of AI & technology. Over the past years, he has developed important networks with international academics. Through domestic and international networks, he continues to collaborate with large research consortia, including a number of SFI, and EU Horizon research projects. His research takes a cross-discipline approach by combining technical and social science research on AI and Data innovation to respond to commercial and social-orientated research demands.
Currently supervising 13 MSc student dissertations:
(a) AI/Data Governance
1. An Embedded Ethical Framework for Software development Pipeline
2. Factors Affecting Cryptocurrency Acceptance As A Financial Tool
3. A Critical Assessment of AdTech's strategic response to the GDPR
4. Impacts of Risk Analysis using Blockchain in Insurance
(b) Climate Risk Mitigation
5. A novel solution for satellite imagery and Carbon quantification of soil types
6. Assessing the utility of a citizen decision support tool for climate risk mitigation with XAI
7. Smart Cities and Autonomous vehicles and anticipating the Financial Impacts
8. Anticipating the impacts of climate change, and extreme weather events on the insurance industry
9. ESG analytics through Green Stats
10. Assessing world trade policies in the battle against climate change
11. Data insights from analysing the effects of Climate Change and Rising Sea Levels on Coastal Populations
(c) Covid-19 Research
12. A critical Data Governance assessment of global Covid APPs
13. Does the pandemic alter the customer perception of insurance? A Study
Currently supervising two PhD students
1. XAI in Insurance
2. Developing a company-specific innovative framework for in-house data analytics to provide a decision support platform
Professional Activities
Committee
- 2023 APEX: Academic and Professional Empowerment Network, UL Apex (Academic and Professional Empowerment Network) Advisory Committee. The role of the Advisory Committee will be to: This network aims to be inclusive of all staff academic, professional, administrative, research, technical and support roles at all levels and ALL GENDERS
- 2022 KBS EDI committee,
- 2022 KBS Athena Swan Silver Committee,
- 2021 UL40 Mature Student Scholarship Committee,
Award
- 2022 - KBS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award
Employment
- 2016 University of Limerick -
Association
- Funded Investigator Irish Software Foundation, SFI LERO
Outreach
- Dr Cunneen has worked and supported community coding projects aimed at providing technology access and coding (MIT Scratch) to economically disadvantaged areas.
Other
- 2016-2019: Working on H2020 VI-DAS Project. Vision Inspired Driver Assistance Systems. To take a significant step forward in ADAS and therefore makes advances towards autonomous driving. To support drivers in accident avoidance and to mitigate the consequences of collisions. To obtain a more comprehensive analysis of a drivers' situational context using a data fusion module. My Role: Worked with UL team and international partners on investigating societal, ethical and legal impacts of increased automation and vehicle data analytics. Published peer-reviewed papers on Autonomous Vehicle decision making and risk.
- 2016-2019: Working on H2020 Cloud Large Scale Video Analytics (LSVA) project. The automotive industry needs tools that can manage the extremely large volumes of data (Big Data) especially to provide support in the annotation task (ADAS, cartography market). The performance of computer vision or video analysis systems is inherently restricted by the quality of the available training data.>>Cloud LSVA Solution >> Cloud-LSVA will analyse and decompose each recorded scene, in order to detect and classify relevant objects and events for specific scenarios. My Role: Worked with UL team and international partners on investigating societal, ethical and legal impacts of increased automation and vehicle data analytics. Published peer-reviewed papers on AI and Autonomous Vehicle data use in relation to societal risk.
- 2020- collaborating with international colleagues to develop innovative strategies for online education that enable greater student participation and inclusion.
- 2021-5: Working as Co-PI on successful SFI funded project EMPOWER (Data Governance) "Empower is a research programme involving researchers from four SFI Research Centres: Lero (the programme lead), Insight, ADAPT and FutureNeuro, aimed at developing new systems and methods to enable and support data governance in the real-world application of data-driven solutions. The research will focus on developing a data ecosystem that benefits all users while defining and safeguarding the rights of data sharers. Data ecosystems, such as smart cities or connected health networks, present new challenges that require a fundamental reconsideration of how we manage and use data. While an effective data ecosystem can empower the exchange of knowledge from organisations and individuals, data movement can also give rise to risks that need to be managed from a socio-ethical perspective." https://www.empower-datagovernance.ie/
- 2021-3: Co-PI Key part of UL's funded project called Anti-FinTer (Versatile artificial intelligence investigative technologies for revealing online cross-border financing activities of terrorism). Created an ethical framework and course content and taught law enforcement agencies across Europe.