Doctorate Honoris Causa, 2016
University of Alicante
DSc by publication, 2008
University of Durham
PhD in Higher Energy Nuclear Physics, 1981
University of Durham
BSc (hons) in Theoretical Physics, 1977
University of Durham
I am currently Emeritus Professor at York, having previously founded and lead the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Group since 1997. I am also Adjunct Professor at Beihang University and Principal Investigator for the Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Big Data and Brain Computing. I am Honorary Professor at Anhui University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Xiamen University. My main research interests are in the use of optimization and probabilistic methods for high and intermediate level vision. I am also interested in the methodology of structural and statistical and pattern recognition. I am currently working on graph kernels and deep learning architectures for graph structured data, polarisation vision, complex networks, and statistical machine learning theory. My work has found applications in areas such as radar terrain analysis, seismic section analysis, remote sensing, and medical imaging. I have published about 200 journal papers and 650 refereed conference publications. I was awarded the Pattern Recognition Society medal in 1991 and an outstanding paper award in 1997 by the journal Pattern Recognition. I have also received best paper prizes at CAIP 2001, ACCV 2002, ICPR 2006 and 2018, BMVC 2007 and ICIAP in 2009 and 2015. In 2009 I was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. In 1998, I became a fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. I am also a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the British Computer Society. In 2016 I became a fellow of the IEEE and was named Distinguished Fellow by the British Machine Vision Association. In 2018 I received the Pierre Devijver Award from the IAPR. I am currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pattern Recognition, and was previously founding Editor-in-Chief of IET Computer Vision from 2006 until 2012. I have also been a member of the editorial boards of the journals IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Image and Vision Computing, and the International Journal of Complex Networks. I was Conference Chair for BMVC in 1994 and Programme Chair in 2016, Track Chair for ICPR in 2004 and 2016 and Area Chair at ECCV 2006 and CVPR in 2008 and 2014, and in 1997 established the EMMCVPR workshop series. I was a Governing Board Member of the IAPR from 2006 to 2016, and was Second Vice President of the Association (2016-2018). I was previously a member of the REF 2014 Computer Science and Informatics Panel, and will serve again on the 2021 Panel. I serve as member of the Royal Society URF Appointments Panel Aiii in the area of Computer Science, Mathematics and Mathematical Physics.
If you are interested in studying for a PhD under my supervision, I welcome applications from good students interested in computer vision, machine learnng or complex networks. More specifically, I am interested in machine learning with graph structured data and the use of complex networks to model time varying data.I would also welcome visiting PhD students, postdocs or academics working in those areas.