Today the UCD NCRA celebrates it’s 20th anniversary. It was founded on 1st January 2006 by Prof Anthony Brabazon and Prof Michael O’Neill when Michael joined the faculty at UCD. There will be a number of activities to mark this anniversary over the course of 2026. First up will be Prof Franz Rothlauf who will visit our group for a number of weeks from mid-January to the end of February.
We would like to take this occasion to acknowledge and thank all the current and past members of the UCD NCRA with whom we jointly celebrate this occasion. Without our PhD students, Postdocs and our numerous academic and industry collaborators we would not be celebrating so much success to date.
For posterity below is an image from the archive (February 2006) when we marked the foundation of the group and simultaneously launched the publication of our book “Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling”. We were and still are deeply grateful for the support we received in forming the group. In the photo we are joined by three of these key people, Prof Hugh Brady (then UCD President – second from the right), Prof Barry Smyth (then Head of School of Computer Science – center/third from the right), and Prof Tom Begley (then Dean of Business – first from the left).
