He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Trinity College University in Dublin in 1999. His work centers on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval in social media and he has extensive experience in the field of author profiling and opinion mining. He has actively contributed to the field of controlled system evaluation and shared tasks as Deputy Steering Committee Chair for the Conference at the CLEF Intitiative and by chairing the PAN shared task collective for the past nine editions (2009-2018). He was recently part of the Organizing Committee for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017) and has taken up roles as editor and reviewer of many notable conferences and journals in computational linguistics.