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BCSWomen Chair Sarah Burnett has had a fab idea, which is to hold a series of webinars that talk about AI and how it is changing the world. In BCSWomen we do a lot of stuff about the women, and a lot of stuff to support women, but we also do a lot of stuff that is useful for tech people in general. The AI Accelerator falls into this category; the idea is that tech is changing and AI is driving that change, so we’re going to try and provide a background and overview of AI to help people get to grips with this. OnceRead More →

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We’ve had our first journal paper published from my EPSRC first grant. It gives a comprehensive review of work into the automated image analysis of plants – well, one particular type of plant, Arabidopsis Thaliana. It’s by Jonathan Bell and myself, and it represents a lot of reading, talking and thinking about computer vision and plants. We also make some suggestions which we hope can help inform future work in this area. You can read the full paper here, if you’re interested in computer vision and plant science. The first grant as a whole is looking at time-lapse photography of plants and aims to buildRead More →

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Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition summer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the postgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to deliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a particular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but never as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a conflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol manipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks, probabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known,Read More →

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Last week (on Friday) we held the Aberystwyth Image Analysis workshop. I think it was the 3rd, or maybe the 4th one of these I’ve organised. The aim is to have some informal talks and posters centred around the theme of image analysis (including image processing, computer vision, and other image-related stuff) from across Aberystwyth. To encourage participation from people whether they’ve got results or not we have 10 minute slots for problem statements, short talks, work in progress and so on, and we have 20 minute slots for longer pieces of work. This year there were 4 departments represented in talks: Computer science, Maths,Read More →

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I gave a talk today about using short videos in teaching, to the Aberystwyth University Teaching and Learning conference (info here). The conference is an annual event which serves as a showcase for best practice in the uni, and it’s always interesting to see what people are up to. As part of my prep for the talk I did a lot of thinking about the different uses of video in learning and teaching, and about the different types of video I’ve put together. So I thought I’d do a blog post about that. If you’re interested in the how, as well as the what andRead More →

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A Lightstage is a system which lets you completely control illumination in a particular space, and capture images from multiple views. They’re used for high resolution graphics capture and computer vision, and they’re fairly rare. I don’t think there are many non-commercial ones in the UK, and they’re research kit (which means you can’t really just go out and buy one, you’ve got to actually build it). Usually, Lightstages are used for facial feature capture, but I’m kinda interested to use them with plants. With the support of the National Plant Phenomics Centre, here in Aberystwyth, and and Aberystwyth University Research Fund grant (URF) I’veRead More →

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In 2015, an IEEE sponsored conference is going to have an ex-playboy centrefold as their guest star. Yes, you read that right. The committee of ICIP – coincidentally, almost entirely made up of guys – think it’s a good idea to have Lena do the prizegiving. Who’s Lena? In a nutshell: Back in 1973, some people wanted a test image One of them had bought some porn to work (wat?) So they said (hur hur) let’s scan that (wat?) And then released it to the “vision community” who’ve been using it ever since… (If you want to find out more about the background to Lena,Read More →

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It’s strange the way that knowledge can change the way we see things. I can’t see a live video feed without wondering how it was put together; how the effects were done; how it was mixed to make a (more or less unified) visual experience… and the gig I went to on Friday (Peter Gabriel, Birmingham) really made me think. Cameras, live video manipulation, and cool computer vision effects have really changed the live music experience. The first time I noticed the use of live video effects in earnest was at an Arctic Monkeys gig in Grenoble, in early 2010. They’d used small screens atRead More →

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This last week I’ve been at an interdisciplinary Rank Prize Fund meeting on sensing and automation in crop production. Normally I am very careful about taking time out during the teaching term, but these meetings are so prestigious, and I managed to talk Roger into delivering one of my lectures, so I don’t think the students missed out much. The Rank Prize Fund is a trust set up by Lord Rank (J. Arthur Rank – he of the film company, with the gong) to support research into his two main interests: optoelectronics, and human nutrition. The Rank Prize Symposiums are meetings which invite a mixtureRead More →

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Right: input plants, left: colour based plant segmentation using Gaussian Mixture Models I’ve won a grant to investigate the dynamic modelling of plant growth using computer vision. The plan is that we’re going to grow a load of Arabidopsis (that’s the plant in the picture above), under time-lapse cameras, and work out where the leaves are, and which leaves cover up which other leaves. Essentially, we’ll use the time-series of images as the plant grows to infer the 3D structure of the plant. Cool, eh? If you might be interested in this kind of project, and you can do computing and machine learning, then getRead More →