Professor Gregory O’Hare delivered a compelling inaugural lecture at Trinity College Dublin on 
29th January 2026, calling for a more judicious integration of sensing technologies and artificial 
intelligence. The talk was entitled “Sense & Sensibility: Delivering Edge Intelligence through the 
judicious integration of Sensing Technology and Artificial Intelligence.”

His inaugural is part of a series of inaugural lectures hosted by the Faculty of STEM office. 
Professor O’Hare’s talk explored how billions of connected devices are transforming everyday 
life into a vast sensing infrastructure. He argued that we are living in an era of ubiquitous data 
capture via smart homes, cars and wearable devices. 

Professor O’Hare challenged the audience to consider how context shapes what we deem 
intelligent behaviour. Drawing on classic reasoning puzzles and real-world analogies, he 
illustrated how human intelligence can falter in abstract settings yet thrive when grounded in 
context.

He took us on a whistle stop tour of key milestones in artificial intelligence from IBM’s Deep 
Blue and DARPA’s autonomous vehicle challenge to AlphaGo and the rise of generative AI tools.
Central to the lecture was the observation that everyday life is being sensed with billions of 
Internet of Things (IoT) devices now capturing continuous streams of data. Professor O’Hare 
argued sensing is not a trivial act in fact sensing must be purposeful and adaptive.

Utilising case studies from his own research such as ambient assisted living, home energy load 
profiling, the CONSUS project on crop optimisation he demonstrated how intelligent sensing 
can deliver meaningful insights while operating within tight computational and energy 
constraints. 

Throughout the lecture, Professor O’Hare returned to a guiding principle “Just because you can 
doesn’t mean you should.” As sensing infrastructures become ubiquitous and data conflation 
techniques increasingly powerful, he emphasised the need for judicious integration.

The lecture concluded with tributes to his research collaborators, students, family, parents and 
sister. He left us with a call to build intelligent systems that are not only powerful, but 
purposeful.