Joseph Ó Ruanaidh

Dr. Joseph Ó Ruanaidh (né Joseph Rooney) born in London, England, in 1967, and raised in Ballyfermot, Dublin, is a frequently cited author in the field of digital watermarking.

He attended O'Connell School in Dublin. In 1984, he joined the Irish Air Corps at Casement Aerodrome, Baldonnel where he was in the 48th Apprentice Class. There he was notable for having unusual technical ability for an apprentice technician. Once he explained to a superior why a rate-of-climb indicator had a logarithmic scale (by formulating a first order differential equation to describe the operation of the device and then solving it). Also, for amusement, he built a digital clock from various basic components such as transistors, capacitors and LEDs that were lying unused in lockers in the laboratory. This clock was the model for an illustration on the front page of the Defence Forces Journal on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Apprentice School. He determined to study for a degree in Electrical Engineering.

He studied on his own, without supervision, to obtain the necessary qualifications to enter Trinity College Dublin in 1986. In 1988 he was awarded a Trinity College Foundation Scholarship where he was also jointly awarded the St Patrick's Benevolent Society of Toronto prize for obtaining the highest overall marks in the scholarship examinations in the university that year.

In 1990 he was awarded three scholarships to go to the University of Cambridge for his PhD where he studied the applications of Bayesian Methods to digital signal processing. The work included novel algorithms for Audio Restoration as well as more general methods for analysing and detecting changes in data. His doctoral dissertation was published in book form by Springer Verlag.

His postdoctoral work at Trinity College Dublin and at the University of Geneva concentrated on the then-emerging field of digital watermarking. He published seminal papers on image transform domain watermarks and, in particular, rotation and translation invariant watermarks based on the Fourier transform.

He moved to the United States in 1998, where he worked at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey and where he played a key role in the development of the patented Siemens directional hearing aid. In 2000, he joined Certus, an Internet start-up, dedicated to making Internet shopping safe.

In 2005 he joined GE Healthcare in Piscataway, New Jersey, where he published four patent applications on optical sectioning, Line Artifact Removal, Brightfield image segmentation and Cell Tracking in microscope images.

He was employed by DE Shaw group, a proprietary trading firm based in New York City, from February 2008 until February 2010. He currently is employed by Apple in Cupertino, California.

His research is well cited as evidenced in CiteSeer, ISI and Google Scholar.

Selected publications

 * J.J.K. Ó Ruanaidh and W. Fitzgerald, Numerical Bayesian Methods Applied to Signal Processing, Springer, New York, 1996, ISBN 978-0-387-94629-0
 * J.J.K. Ó Ruanaidh and T. Pun, "Rotation, scale and translation invariant spread spectrum digital image watermarking," Signal Processing, vol. 66, no. 5, pp. 303–317, May 1998.
 * J.J.K. Ó Ruanaidh, R.R. McKay, Y. Zhang, M. Briggs, J. George and Z. Masoumi, "The application of Bayesian spectral analysis to optical sectioning using structured light imaging", Journal of Microscopy, Volume 232 Issue 1, Pages 177–185, Published Online: 25 Sep 2008.

Awards and honors

 * Anglo-Irish Science Exchange Scholarship
 * Trinity College Cambridge Research Studentship
 * IEE Leslie H Paddle Scholarship
 * Trinity College Dublin Foundation Scholarship
 * St Patrick's Benevolent Society of Toronto prize
 * Victor W Graham Prize for Mathematics 1988