Anthony Quinn

Biography

Anthony Quinn is a senior academic (associate professor) in electronic engineering at Trinity College Dublin. He has had tenure there for twenty four years, and is a Fellow of the College since 2008. He has specialized for nearly thirty years in the development of theory and methods in statistical signal processing. He has an international reputation in Bayesian methodology, i.e. fully probabilistic methods for coping with uncertainty, inspiring optimal design and algorithm flows. He co-authored the first, and highly cited, book (Springer, 2006) on Bayesian methods for the design of signal processing algorithms that can be implemented efficiently (i.e. low energy and computational costs) on computers and specialized hardware. His algorithms have been applied in several practical contexts, notably in signal and image analysis for medical diagnosis and advisory system design. More recently, he has collaborated with his long-time partners in the Czech Academy of Sciences on important problems in Bayesian decision-making and design, with applications in distributed knowledge processing for sensor networks. This work has led to what is probably the first formal Bayesian definition of the transfer learning problem, a key concern in machine learning. He is developing new results in this area currently, as a one-year Fulbright visiting scholar at the renowned Michael Jordan group in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has recently secured an appointment as research scientist in the Department of Adaptive Systems at the Czech Academy of Sciences (2017-20). Professor Quinn is a committed educator in electrical engineering. He has originated and developed innovative courses in probability (which has been approved for the entire Junior Sophister engineering student cohort in his School) and in statistical signal processing (a module which he developed for the MAI Fifth Year programme in Electronic Engineering, and which was central to the success of the programme in professional accreditation). He has served in many senior roles professionally in his discipline and in his College. He named, lead-authored and developed the E3 and its Strategy in 2012, which received strong endorsement internationally. It has since been adopted as a priority infrastructure project by College. He serves recurrently, and for many years, on committees of several of the best international conferences and funding agencies. He was general chair of the Irish Signals and Systems Conference in 2011, and has acted as external examiner in Ireland and France.

Research Interest

BAYESIAN INFERENCE; Bayesian signal and system identification; Bayesian signal processing in medicine and communications; Communication theory; Digital signal processing; Estimation; Image segmentation; Information theory; Probability theory; Signal Processing; Variational / stochastic approximations Bayesian inference