Pádraig Cunningham

Timeline

1. 1992–2006

   Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin

   He holds a B.E. and an M.Eng.Sci. from NUI Galway and a Ph.D. from Dublin University, then works at Digital Equipment Corporation as a software engineer and at Hitachi Europe as a research scientist. He joins Trinity College Dublin as a lecturer in 1992 and is promoted to senior lecturer and then associate professor before leaving in 2006.

2. 2000

   Diversity in classification ensembles

   In 2000, he and John Carney publish a paper at the European Conference on Machine Learning on classification ensembles built with feature subset selection. It proposes an entropy measure of the outputs of the ensemble members to monitor ensemble diversity and tests it on a medical prediction problem.

3. 2004

   ECCAI Fellow and PAIS chair

   He becomes a Fellow of ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee on Artificial Intelligence, in 2004, and serves as programme chair of PAIS 2004, the Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems track of ECAI. EurAI lists him among its current Fellows.

4. 2005

   Case-based spam filtering

   In 2005, he coauthors a paper with Sarah Jane Delany and Dónal Doyle on generating estimates of classification confidence for a case-based spam filter, published in the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning.

5. 2006–2009

   Professor at UCD, leading Clique

   He moves to University College Dublin in 2006 to take up a full professorship in the School of Computer Science and Informatics. In 2009, he leads Clique, a Science Foundation Ireland Strategic Research Cluster funded with €3.56 million, in which a team from UCD and NUI Galway works with IBM, Idiro Technologies and Norkom Technologies on techniques for analysing customer and user networks.

6. 2010

   Tracking communities in dynamic networks

   In 2010, he coauthors a paper with Dónal Doyle and Derek Greene for the ASONAM'10 conference on tracking the evolution of communities in dynamic social networks. It describes a model in which each community is characterised by a series of evolutionary events, and applies the tracking strategy to monthly call graphs of mobile operator networks with millions of subscribers.

7. 2020

   A tutorial on nearest neighbours

   In 2020, he and Sarah Jane Delany post the second edition of their tutorial on k-nearest neighbour classifiers on arXiv. It surveys similarity measures, the computational cost of finding neighbours and dimension reduction, and adds sections on time-series similarity, retrieval speed-up and intrinsic dimensionality along with Python code.

8. November 2025

   A study of review papers

   In November 2025, he and Barry Smyth, both in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin, release the preprint "Have we reached the beginning of the end for review papers?" It reports rapid growth in review papers, a declining citation advantage and a stronger generative-AI signal in review papers than in primary research papers.