Patricia Scanlon

She founded SoapBox Labs in 2013, a company that applies artificial intelligence to develop speech recognition applications that are specifically tuned to children's voices.

[3] After completing her PhD, she worked at Bell Labs in Dublin on projects in immersive communications, e-health and acoustic signalling.

[6] She received backing from Enterprise Ireland and Astia Angels members and worked out of Trinity College Dublin's incubation centre from 2014 until 2016.

[3] SoapBox used thousands of hours of audio of children aged 2-12 from 192 countries in real-world noisy environments to create its own dataset.

[2] Scanlon's appointment was announced by Minister of State Robert Troy after an open expression of interest call and assessment process.

[2] Scanlon's role is to lead a national conversation about the place, benefits, and risks of AI, working with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment.