Prof. Conor Ryan is a Professor of Machine Learning in the Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) department, a Funded Investigator within Lero (the Irish Software Research Centre) and a Science Foundation of Ireland Principal Investigator. 

He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013/14 and was CTO of NVMdurance, a company that optimized Flash Memory products, until it had a successful exit in early 2018.

Conor is interested in applying Machine Learning techniques to medical diagnosis, particularly in semi-automated mammography, and studied with Prof. Lásló Tabar in 2005 to obtain American Medical Association accreditation in Breast Cancer Screening. He also uses Machine Learning to perform data analytics on medical data (including so-called “Big Data”) to extract insights from large quantities of data. Current health-related projects include an Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund project to develop a Stage 1 Breast Cancer Detection system, involving Cork University Hospital and the Royal Surrey County Hospital, as well as a longer-term project looking at cardiotocograph (CTG) interpretation.

Publications
  • Conor Ryan, Jeannie Fitzgerald, Krzysztof Krawiec, and David Medernach. Image classification with genetic programming: Building a stage 1 computer aided detector for breast cancer. In Handbook of Genetic Programming Applications, pages 245–287. Springer, Cham, 2015.      DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20883-1_10. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20883-1_10

  • Jeannie M. Fitzgerald, Conor Ryan, David Medernach, and Krzysztof Krawiec. An integrated approach to stage 1 breast cancer detection. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2015, Madrid, Spain, July 11-15, 2015, pages 1199–1206, 2015. DOI: 10.1177/0265659016656906. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2754761

  • Conor Ryan, Krzysztof Krawiec, Una-May O’Reilly, Jeannie Fitzgerald, and David Medernach. Building a stage 1 computer aided detector for breast cancer using genetic programming. In EuroGP 2014, Granada, Spain, April 23-25, 2014, , pages 162–173, 2014. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-44303-3_14. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-44303-3_14

  • Daniel Howard, Simon C. Roberts, Adrian Brezulianu, and Conor Ryan. Initial exploitation of the SONNET derived taxonomy of mammographic parenchymal patterns. In Frontiers in the Convergence of Bioscience and Information Technologies 2007, FBIT 2007, Jeju Island, Korea, October 11-13, 2007, pages 390–395, 2007. DOI: 10.1109/FBIT.2007.156. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4524138

  • Daniel Howard, Simon C Roberts, Conor Ryan, and Adrian Brezulianu. Textural classification of mammographic parenchymal patterns with the sonnet self organizing neural network. BioMed Research International, 2008. DOI: 10.1155/2008/526343. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2008/526343/