Professor Conor Ryan is Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Limerick. He was awarded his PhD in Genetic Programming, a style of Machine Learning, in 1996, and was the inventor, along with two of his PhD students, of Grammatical Evolution, in 1998. Grammatical Evolution is the most commonly used non-patented Evolutionary Automatic Programming system in the world, and has spawned thousands of publications since its inception. Conor was a Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in 2013-2014. He holds several granted patents in the use of Machine Learning to extend the life and reliability of Flash Memory and Solid State Disks (SSDs), and was the co-founder of two companies, Evolvability and NVMdurance, both of which are located in Limerick. Conor’s research group, the Biocomputing and Developmental Systems (BDS) group, within Lero conducts research into areas such as Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation and the application of these techniques to large scale problems, such as mammography.