Among ADAPT’s Innovating Women is Dr. Susan McKeever, Head of AI and Data Science Discipline at Technological University Dublin.
In 2017, ADAPT’s Dr Susan McKeever, conceived of and co-founded a network, consisting of third level education institutions across Ireland, focussed on addressing female student recruitment and retention in computing programmes. Prior to this, third levels operated in a more isolated way investing substantial time and money on their own gender equality efforts in the computing domain. Having undertaken a number of gender initiatives in her own school, she realised that other third levels were contributing to their own successful gender balance initiatives but could be utilised more effectively to a larger greater good.
Together with Dr. Catherine Mooney, Dr McKeever founded the Irish Network for Gender Equality in Computing (Ingenic), working with a dedicated and enthusiastic set of representatives across all third levels in Ireland. They have since created a valuable high impact network that has had funding wins and acted as a valuable resource for national data gathering, shared best practices and more.
As well as this, Dr McKeever was previously shortlisted for the Best Application of AI to achieve Social Good Award in last year’s AI Awards for her project N-Light. This project is focussed on developing an AI-driven platform that identifies patterns of child sexual abuse and grooming behaviours from child victim reports. In collaboration with her colleague Dr. Christina Thorpe from TU Dublin, the project was awarded funding from Unicef’s Tech Coalition’s Safe Online Research fund which aims to discover patterns of child grooming and abuser activities through the use of AI on victim and abuser forums chats.
The output of the work will be a web based tool, for use by the child support and hotline agency, enabling them to identify deeper hidden patterns within and across their information in relation to CSAM production. This tool offers the opportunity to scale up throughout the EU and beyond, including child support and hotline agencies, opening the opportunity for the N-Light tool to be used by other countries.
ADAPT is delighted to recognise the many achievements of Dr McKeever as one of our Innovating Women across the centre and we look forward to supporting her continued successes.
