Dr Claire McNamara

Claire McNamara is a RINN AI Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at Trinity, funded by a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. Her thesis introduced the Initial Exploration Problem, the challenge non-technical users face as they begin exploration of complex knowledge graphs. She addressed this through natural language questions and answers curated by domain experts with AI support, evaluated on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland’s knowledge graph. She then spent six months at Accenture Labs researching uncertainty quantification and abstention in large language models. Claire’s research focuses on trustworthy AI over complex heterogeneous data, particularly within the Digital Humanities, in a manner that foregrounds provenance, citability, and evidence. Her work to date has been published at ACM IUI and at SEMANTiCS workshops.