John Breslin, University of Galway Professor, Startup Co-Founder, Advisor, Board Member, Educator, Engineer, Entrepreneur

Biography

Prof. John Breslin

John Breslin is an Established Professor of Electronic Engineering in the School of Engineering at the University of Galway, where he is Director of the TechInnovate and AgInnovate programmes. John has taught electronic engineering, computer science, innovation and entrepreneurship topics over the past 25 years. He is a Principal Investigator on the Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland Insight Centre for Data Analytics, and a Principal Investigator on the Data2Sustain European Digital Innovation Hub. With a h-index of 57, over 14,000 citations, and various best paper awards, he has jointly written about 350 peer-reviewed academic publications, including books on The Social Semantic Web and Social Semantic Web Mining. He co-created the SIOC framework (Wikipedia article), implemented in hundreds of applications (by Yahoo, Boeing, Vodafone, etc.) on at least 65,000 websites with 35 million data instances. He has featured in 275 mainstream media items including articles from CNN, Forbes, New Scientist, Washington Post, and France 24, and has been on 35 panels and given over 80 talks at venues including Stanford, Tsinghua University, and the Library of Congress.

John co-authored the Irish bestsellers Old Ireland in Colour (Nielsen BookScan Christmas Number One in Ireland 2020, Best Irish-Published Book Award 2020, Wikipedia article), Old Ireland in Colour 2 (Number One in Ireland, end of November 2021) and Old Ireland in Colour 3. John is Co-Founder of boards.ie (Ireland's largest discussion forum website; Wikipedia article), adverts.ie (classified ads website), and StreamGlider (real-time streaming newsreader app). He has won two IIA Net Visionary Awards, an ITAG Outstanding Contribution to the ICT Sector Award, and a Galway Chamber President's Award (Business Person of the Year). He is Co-Founder of the PorterShed (Galway City Innovation District), and serves on the Advisory Council of Scale Ireland. John is Cathaoirleach (Chair) of Gaillimh le Gaeilge, a Former Director and Past Chair of WestBIC, and a Director Emeritus of the American Council of Exercise. He undertook the Entrepreneurship Development Program with Bill Aulet at MIT in 2017. He also runs the Breslin Archive since 2019 and the Tomita Fansite since 1995. He likes Japanese and French culture. From Fanore in the Burren, he lives in Connemara, and holidays in Carcassonne.