Professor Edwin Hancock

A brief history.....

I have been with the Department of Computer Science at the University of York since July 1991. I am currently Professor of Computer Vision, having previously been Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader. My research interests are in the areas of computer vision and pattern recognition. I have externally funded projects in the areas of terrain analysis, sensor fusion and visual learning. Funding for my activities here has totalled more than GBP 2M over the past five years. Most of what I do involves Bayesian models or optimisation. An important thread running through my research is how to use relational graphs to represent visual information and how to match inexact graphs. Ongoing research topics  include machine learning in computer vision, graph-spectral methods, 3D surface reconstruction from 2D images and quantum computing. I am happy to supervise research-students in the broad areas of computer vision, statistical pattern recognition or connectionism. Details of my research can be found on my research pages.

I have been active in computer vision and pattern recognition for about 20 years. Prior to this I did a PhD and a postdoc in high-energy nuclear physics, which involved experiments at CERN and Stanford. My first degree was in theoretical physics. I have held teaching posts with the Open University, and, in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Surrey University.

Since 2006 I have been founding  Editor-in-Chief of the new IET Computer Vision Journal. I was  an Associate Editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence between 1999 and 2004. From 1991 until 2005, I was an Associate Editor for  Pattern Recognition, and since  2005 I  have been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal.  Recently, I became an Area Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding. I have also been a Guest Editor for Image and Vision Computing. In 1994 I Chaired the 1994 British Machine Vision Conference.  In 1995, I co-founded the EMMCVPR Workshop series with Marcello Pelilllo. I have been a co-chair of AMDO 2002 and GbR 2003.  I have also been Track Chair for Computer Vision in ICPR 2004, and I was an   Area Chair for ECCV 2006 and am currently Area Chair for CVPR 2008. Between 1998 and 2002, I was Chair of IAPR TC4 (Computer Vision). Recently, I have been on the Programme Committees of CVPR, ECCV, ICML and ICPR, together with a large number of smaller conferences and workshops. I have given invited keynote talks at SSPR 2002, ICIAP 2005 and DICTA 2007.

Here is a list of my publications in computer vision and pattern recognition. I have received the best paper medal and an outstanding paper award for my contributions to the journal Pattern Recognition. I also received best paper awards from CAIP 2002 , ACCV 2002, ICPR 2006 and BMVC 2007 (Siemens Best Security Paper Prize).  I have published about 110 journal papers and 450 refereed conference papers. I hold or have held a total of 10 EPSRC grants, and five of these were rated outstanding/internationally leading on their final report. I have also been successful in obtaining funding from Qinetiq, Shell,  the EC and the Wolfson Foundation. I have supervised about 25 successful PhD theses, some of which can be downloaded. My own PhD genealogy is made up mainly of physicists, but includes some mathematicians and  the odd famous name too.

I am a member of UKCRC, a fellow of the IAPR, the Institute of Physics, the  IET and the BCS, and Governing Board Member of the IAPR. In 2008 the University of Durham awarded me a D.Sc. degree for my published work in pattern recognition and computer vision. From October 2009, I will be a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder.

For my sins, I am Chair of the department research committee (responsible for the RAE return, study leave requests and travel/pump priming funding allocation), and was previously Graduate Chair in the  Department for six years. I am also a member of the University Research Committee,  and  was  previously a member of Senate (then known as the General Academic Board) and the Graduate Schools Board. I have been an external examiner for taught  masters courses at UCL and the University of Edinburgh,  for undergraduate courses at Warwick and some 30 PhD theses in the UK and abroad.

Here is my full CV, my listing from DBLP (and an interesting statistic) and most of my journal papers from 2000, plus a few from before (I am working my way back slowly!). 

Finally, here I am strutting  (actually, umm-ing, ah-ing and err-ing) my stuff. This link takes you to some talks on the PASCAL video-lecture archive, mostly on graph-based methods in pattern analysis and computer vision. There is a tutorial overview on pattern analysis using graphs and trees. And talks describing our recent work on diffusion smoothing, relaxation labelling using the Fokker-Planck equation, embedding using the wave kernel, applications of the Ihara zeta function and constructing statistical models for directional data. I particularly enjoyed giving the one at the  Erice School ``Eduardo Caianello '' on the Analysis of Patterns, since the  immense bronze of the Dirac equation reminded me of my time in particle physics and an earlier visit in 1984. This link takes you to  a recent talk on diffusion processes on graphs and the heat equation given at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. This link  is to a (rather noisy)  talk on characterising graphs given as a keynote at the ACL 2010 TextGraphs Workshop in Uppsala.   And, this link takes you to a talk on our work on recovering facial shape using single shaded views.

 

 

 

My telephone number is +44 1904 43 3374 (office).  My email address is erh@cs.york.ac.uk.