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

Biography

Prof. John Breslin

John Breslin is a Personal Professor in Electronic Engineering at the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Galway, where he is Director of the TechInnovate / AgInnovate programmes. John has taught electronic engineering, computer science, innovation and entrepreneurship topics over the past 20 years. Associated with two SFI Research Centres, he is a Principal Investigator at Insight (Data Analytics) and a Funded Investigator at VistaMilk (AgTech), and a Principal Investigator on the EDIH Data2Sustain. With a h-index of 50, over 10,000 citations, and various best paper awards, he has jointly written over 300 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 (Christmas 2020 Number One in Ireland, Best Irish-Published Book Award 2020, Wikipedia article), Old Ireland in Colour 2 (End-November 2021 Number One in Ireland) 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, a Galway Chamber President's Award, and a Best Irish-Published Book Award. He is Co-Founder of the PorterShed (Galway City Innovation District), and serves on the Steering Group 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 the Burren, he lives in Connemara, and holidays in Carcassonne.