Prof. Fionn Murtagh
Director Information, Communications & Emergent Technologies Directorate
Tel: + 353 (0) 1 607 3056
Email: fionn.murtagh@sfi.ie
Niamh Murphy (PA), Tel: + 353 (0) 1 607 3007; Email: laura.foley@sfi.ie
Prof Fionn Murtagh joined SFI from Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was Head of the Computer Science Department. Prior to his position at Royal Holloway, he held Chairs in Queen's University Belfast, and the University of Ulster's Magee College. He served with the European Space Agency's Space Science Department for 12 years, on the Hubble Space Telescope project, based at the European Southern Observatory, Garching/Munich, Germany. Prof Murtagh was on the staff of the Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, in the early 1980s, followed by a posting at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy.
He holds BA, BAI degrees in Engineering Science and Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin; an MSc in Computer Science also from TCD; a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Université P&M Curie, Paris 6; and an Habilitation (HDR) from Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg.
Prof Murtagh is a world-leading authority on clustering, data analysis and data mining. He has been President (2008-2009) of the Classification Society of North America, and is currently President of the British Classification Society. He is also a leading authority on wavelet and other multiresolution methods in image and signal processing. His latest book, with Jean-Luc Starck and Jalal Fadili, Sparse Image and Signal Processing: Wavelets, Curvelets and Morphological Diversity, is published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. He has published 6 books and 120 journal papers, together with a few hundred conference and other papers and edited compilations.
He was Editor-in-Chief of the Computer Journal for 7 years, and is currently a member of the editorial boards of the journals Pattern Recognition, Journal of Classification, Neurocomputing, p-Adic Numbers, Ultrametric Analysis, and Applications, International Journal of Software and Informatics, and New Astronomy.
He is an elected member of UKCRC, the UK Computing Research Council, the leading representative body for computer science research in the UK, and currently serves on its executive. Prof Murtagh was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Ireland’s scholarly academy, in 2003. He is an elected Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and of the British Computer Society.
