Biography:

Michael graduated from the University of Dublin, Trinity College in 1994 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. After working in industry for a number of years, he completed a Higher Diploma in Computer Science at University College Dublin in 2000. Michael received his Ph.D. in Computer Sciance from University College Dublin in 2004. Subsequently, he was employed as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics Information Hiding Laboratory and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the CLARITY Center for Sensor Web Technologies. He has refereed for many Journals and International Conferences, which have included the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, ACM Transactions on the Web and IEEE Intelligent Systems. He was co-chair of the Doctoral Symposium at the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2009 and has served on the Program Committee of the leading International Conferences in his area of research.

Michael¿s research interests lie in the areas of Recommender Systems, Robust Information Retrieval and Filtering, Personalisation, Collaborative Web Search and Reputation Systems. During his PhD. and in subsequent work, Michael investigated the robustness of collaborative recommender systems against malicious attack. This work introduced and defined the concept of robustness for recommender systems, which are a key component of e-commerce applications. In this research, it was demonstrated that malicious attacks are capable of significantly biasing recommendations that are made for target items, and a range of techniques to secure recommender systems against attack were developed. Prior to this work, the research community had devoted little attention to the topic of secure recommendation. Subsequently, the community has become engaged and many journal and conference papers have been published on this topic in recent times. Michael¿s seminal paper on robust collaborative recommendation has been cited in over 70 academic publications and by The Economist magazine, in an article entitled United We Find.
 
More recently, Michael has extended his robustness analysis to the broader field of collaborative and social systems. In addition, he has worked in the areas of Collaborative Web Search, Search Discovery and User Generated Content Analysis. Michael has also lectured in Computer Science Undergraduate and MSc. Degree Programmes at University College Dublin over several years, where he was responsible for designing, implementing and delivering module content. In addition, he has supervised the dissertations of several Ubiquitous and Multimedia Systems MSc. Degree students to completion.