Cathal Gurrin's research interests are primarily focused on methodologies of content-based retrieval of documents from the World Wide Web by utilising hyperlink structure to improve retrieval performance and management of information from digital video libraries.

Dr. Gurrin is currently analysing the structure of the WWW with the aim of accurately modelling the complexities of real-world web linkage in small, manageable test collections. These small test collections could then better support faithful experiments into the development of linkage-based retrieval algorithms than the current generation of test collection. Dr. Gurrin has just completed the construction of a linkage graph for 94.5 million web pages and is in the process of developing a Search Engine to provide fast, linkage-based retrieval facilities over these pages.

As part of his postdoctoral duties, Dr. Gurrin works closely with fellow members of the Centre for Digital Video Processing in DCU. He has developed a ranking scheme, which ranks videos, or their constituent shots, in response to a user query by combining a number of sources of evidence (textual, image processing based, etc.) in order to support content search facilities in a version of the Físchlár digital video retrieval system.

Dr. Gurrin is also involved in the application of hyperlink based search and retrieval to the problem of navigating digital archives - in particular, archives of news programmes and digital images. The goal of this research is to enable a user to browse through digital video and image libraries using automatically generated links, with the same ease as a user can browse the web.