Profile

I live in York with my wife Michelle and our 5 year old daughter Harriet, both total legends. I’m originally from Middlesbrough in the North East and a big fan of “the Boro”.

I play 6 a side footy every week and try to go running or do some kind of exercise a few days a week. I also love lots of “outdoorsy” things like hiking, rock climbing and camping. An unusual hobby I have is “winter climbing” which many people are surprised you can do in the UK. I’ve even been ice climbing in the North York Moors and Peak District. Check this out!

I love music and play guitar, drums and piano. I have a couple of very random claims to fame. I played percussion on a Frosties advert, was an extra in the movie “Atonement” and appeared in two episodes of Emmerdale as a half of a hapless musical duo…

I’ve been pretty obsessed with computers since my brother got an Amstrad CPC6128 when I was about 6. I learnt some programming from a friend’s dad who was a computer science lecturer, then taught myself. Weirdly, I’ve never really played video games.

Computer vision is all about taking images and videos and getting useful information from them. It could be recognising a face, helping a self-driving car to navigate, reading a QR code using a phone or even giving a robot a visual system like a human. I work on lots of different projects but let me tell you about the coolest one…

We’ve only had satellites looking at the Earth since the 1970s. It’s hard to know how things looked before then with much accuracy. However, the polar explorers took cameras with them on their expeditions. They took lots of photos and some of them show glaciers. If we have some information about the cameras they used and if they took more than one image that overlaps, we can build a 3D model of the ice surface. This lets us compare the height of the ice then and now, providing another way to help us understand the effects of climate change. Here’s a model we built from some photos taken in the early 1930s:

My work involves computer programming, practical work in labs such as calibrating old cameras and lots of maths. I use the maths I learnt at secondary school every single day: algebra, trigonometry, geometry, statistics. Honestly, it’s all so incredibly useful!

One of the really cool things scientists get to do is to travel around the world to work with other scientists. I lived in San Diego for 3 months working at the University of California and have been to loads of countries for conferences or to visit collaborators. In computer science, we’re particularly lucky – we have our own German castle! If you’re lucky enough to get invited, you get to spend a week here with other researchers working on the same problems.

I’m going to describe a typical day before coronavirus, otherwise it would mainly involve me sitting in my loft working at home…

07:00 – wake up, coffee and blueberry wheats for breakfast. Jazz on the radio while my brain is fuzzy.

08:45 – drop my daughter at school

09:00 – cycle to work (everyone should cycle to work! It doesn’t cost anything, it’s faster in traffic, less polluting and you get a workout for free!) Here’s the building where I work. Nice eh!

09:30 – I like to work on tricky problems in the morning. I spend a lot of time standing at my whiteboard writing crazy maths. Here’s what it looked like just before lockdown:

Once I have a new idea on how to solve the problem I’m working on, I’ll usually spend some time programming at my computer to see if it actually works in practice.

11:30 – Computer vision involves lab work. We have a dark room where we can capture images with controlled lighting, 3D scans or use special cameras. Here’s our “lightstage” that we can use to scan people’s faces.

12:30 – lunch (usually a boring sandwich, sometimes I go wild and get noodles from the canteen)

13:00 – supervision meetings with PhD students. This is always exciting. They are all incredibly smart people with great ideas. So, I get to hear what they’ve been working on and what works. Then I make suggestions on where they’ve got stuck or new things they might try.

15:00 – head over to the environment department to meet my glaciology collaborators. It’s brilliant to talk to experts in a completely different area. Often I use words they don’t understand and they do the same, so we have to ask each other a lot of questions that might seem stupid, but are crucial if we are to understand each other. This meeting might uncover something we need to investigate further so…

16:00 – working with my research associate, we scour the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute (who we collaborate with) to find some information about the cameras used on a particular mission. We realise that it’s important to understand how the glass plates were held in the camera. We have a similar antique camera in our lab so…

16:30 – run up to the computer vision lab. Make some measurements and do some quick calculations. The problem we have sounds like something similar in another area of 3D computer vision so…

17:00 – back to my office. Read a textbook. Post a question in an online forum and ask for help on twitter. Someone suggests a relevant article. Read that. It sounds like we have a solution! I’ll come back to this in the morning.

17:30 – argh – I’ve forgotten to do all the boring stuff. Quick! Reply to some emails, fill in some online forms, do a bit of work on a grant proposal.

18:00 – cycle home, eat, relax.

21:00 – I’m sitting watching TV and then … that problem is just too interesting. I can’t get it out of my head. Write some notes on a piece of paper… Hang on, it’s much more complicated than I’d realised! This is what I’ll work on tomorrow morning!