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THE IRISH MIND
winning the 1999 title for her project on encryption. Flannerywent on to take first place at the 11th EUScience Con- test in Greece and represented the Eu- ropeanUnion at the International Nobel Prize ceremonies inDecember 1999. She laterwon an Intel Fellows AchievementAward. She graduated in 2003 fromCam-
bridgeUniversitywith a degree in com- puter engineering. Since then she has worked forWolframResearch and ElectronicArts. She helped found games developer, Tirnua,whichwas ac- quired by RockYou inDecember 2010 andwhere she is nowdirector, analyt- ics. In 2001, InCode:AMathematical Jour-
ney, the book she co-wrotewith her fa- ther,mathematicianDavid Flannery, was published. The book tells the story of themaking and breaking of her algo- rithm. In 2000,Dr Thomas Gernon, then a
student at Colaiste Ris inDundalk,won for hiswork on the numericalmodel- ling of urbanisation trends in Europe. His project, ‘The geography andmathe- matics of Europe’s urban centres’,was also awarded the alumni prize at the 12th EuropeanUnion Contest for Young Scientists. Subsequently, hewas hon- ouredwith a joint civic reception from Louth County Council andDundalk UrbanDistrict Council. Gernon studied geology atUCD,
graduatingwith first-class honours in 2004.His PhD,which he completed be- tween 2004 and 2007 at theUniversity of Bristol, focused on the dynamics of explosive volcanic eruptions that brought diamonds to the Earth’s sur- face. Since 2009, he has been a lecturer in earth science at theUniversity of Southampton. Prior to this, heworked as a postdoctoral fellowat theUniver- sity of Bristol, and a lecturer in geology at TCD. He haswon several other prestigious
awards, including the 2004 Cunning- hamPrize of the Geological Survey of Ireland, and the 2010 President’s Award of the Geological Society of Lon- don,which ‘recognises outstanding tal- ent in very early career geoscientists’. According to Gernon, some of his ca-
reer highlights in the last fewyears have included conducting geological
‘Technology, chemistry and biochemistry are industries in need of a healthy pipeline of talent and ideas, and theGovernment has reiterated its commitment to research and development in these disciplines’
in his skills. “Iwould say it didn't com- pletely changemy career trajectory, but did giveme a sense ofwhat I really wanted to focus on in the future –mak- ing theweb a better place.” Hewas offered a positionwith
Microsoft soon after the contest, but turned it down to study at Sheffield- Hallam,Warwick and Oxford universi- ties.He nowhas a degree in applied computing (software engineering), a master’s in computer science and cer- tificates in software security. “I'veworked as a software engineer
at companies likeAOL, currentlywork as a developer programs engineer at Google and amworking on releasing two books on best-practices for JavaScript developers. I feel blessed thatmuch ofmy spare time also now spent travelling theworld giving talks and contributing back to the open- source community.” His plans for the future include
teaching his own kids howto code. “I hope they one day consider entering the contest too. Itwas an amazing ex- perience.” One of themost entrepreneurial of
surveys in theworld’s largest diamond mines in theKalahariDesert, finding a US$500,000 diamond inArctic Canada, and surveying active volcanoes in the Lipari Islands, Santorini,Utah, Tenerife,Montserrat and theKam- chatka Peninsula. Addy Osmaniwon the award in 2003
for ‘The graphical, technological and user-friendly advancement of the inter- net browser’. “My project XWebs set out to offer a faster experience for browsing on theweb,” explains Osmani, whowas a student at St Finian’s Col- lege inMullingar at the time. “Theway it did thiswas fairly simple: think about theway that a farmer could getmore done if he split hisworkload between his sons rather than doing it all himself. “In the sameway, XWebs optimised
howmuch data aweb browser could retrieve in a space of time every time it fetched a newfile for aweb page. It would create a newconnection [son] to grab every nth part of a file rather than just using a single connection for each one.” Osmani sayswinning the award
helped to instil in himsome confidence 76 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 4 Spring/Summer 2012
thewinners to date is Patrick Collison, whowas awarded the title in 2005 for ‘Croma:Anewdialect of lisp’. Collison went on towin second place at the EU Young Scientists Exhibition, and then studied physics atMIT in Boston. In 2007, aged 18, he left the pro-
gramme early to co-found a tech com- panywith his younger brother, John, whowas in transition-year at the time. The companywas originally called Shuppa but latermergedwith andwas renamedAuctomatic. That company was acquired inMarch 2008 for US$5mby Live CurrentMedia, a Van- couver-based technology company. Patrickwent on towork for that com- pany as a director of engineering.He is nowworkingwith Stripe (another com- pany co-foundedwith his brother John), a developer payment software firmbased in San Francisco, California. In 2006,Aisling Judge a second-year
student atKinsale Community School in Co Cork became the youngest ever overallwinner of the competition for ‘The development and evaluation of a biological food spoilage indicator’. “This project developed and
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