Alan Smeaton is Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), a University Designated Research Centre based partly in the School of Computing, and partly in the School of Electronic Engineering. He is a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator and recipient of the President's Research Award for Science and Engineering in 2002.

The CDVP involves seven academic Faculty, six post-doctoral researchers, nineteen Ph.D. students and three technical and administrative support personnel. The mission of the CDVP is to research and develop techniques and tools to automatically analyse and index digital video information and allow content-based operations such as browsing, searching, alerting, filtering and summarisation. This work takes up most of Prof. Smeaton's research effort and has led to over sixty research papers and presentations in the last three years alone. During 2002 the CDVP secured research funding to the value of over 2.2M from Irish research agencies, from the EU Sixth Framework Programme, and from industry.

Prof. Smeaton's area of research is primarily concerned with the analysis and indexing of information in all kinds of media, for the purpose of supporting search, browsing, linking, summarisation and automatic linking. This broad area, called "information retrieval", covers work in digital video, as part of the CDVP, but also encompasses research on indexing and searching of gene sequences with Dr. Stephen Blott (funded from an Enterprise Ireland Basic research grant). It also covers work on indexing and retrieval of inter-linked text documents in work with Dr. Cathal Gurrin, where they apply variants of PageRank to large (Terabyte-size) collections of web documents. Finally, it covers work on access to digital libraries of old manuscripts, as part of the ISOS project in collaboration with the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.