Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
I've done something fun recently - I was interviewed about my views on Neural Networks, Machine Learning and whether we should fear AI (the answer is "no" but do fear how it is used and by whom!) This was linked to the OU's support of the Ri's 2023 Xmas Lectures on AI,
I grew up and went to school in High Wycombe, a leafy, furniture making town in the Chilterns. This was followed by a BSc in Physics and PhD in Biophysics (1987) at Imperial College (IC). I then held a joint postdoc funded by the Wellcome Trust between IC and the Royal London Hospital during which I constructed a visual psychophysics lab in a small room off the Neurology Ward. I was instrumental in measuring the effectiveness of neurological treatments. I also occasionally visited the museum to see the skeleton of the "Elephant Man" (no longer on public show).
My research at this time was on Visual Dysfunction and my most interesting subject was a person with Visual Agnosia. As a result of this research I became interested in modelling the human visual system and with a travel grant from the Royal Society I went to Bell Labs in 1990 to learn about artificial Neural Networks. [By the by I think I was the first person ever to negotiate a job via email - this was back in 1988!] Here I became involved in the work of the Adaptive Systems Research Department on recognizing characters - handwritten or machine printed, on paper or a tablet. Initially this was applied to automating mail sorting for the US Post Office, but later the technology was (and is) used by banks around the world to read and process checks. I also pioneered a neural network architecture called a Siamese Neural Network which I used for Signature Verification. You can see a demo of it from 1993 here. Since then it has found useful applications in things like facial recognition to open your phone or at passport control. Less good uses have been in its uncritical application for example in policing systems which has led to miscarriages of justice.
In case you think I'm just about Computing and AI, I have wide ranging interests. I've tutored school children in Robotics, including representing the UK in RoboCup Junior at the World Finals in Suzhou, China in 2008; grow bananas; used to drive a 1970 Triumph Spitfre Mark III, but now have a much too powerful 1990 ZR1 Corvette; and can run 5k in under 30 minutes.
This collaboration started 7 years ago with Prof Stephen Serjeant and just one student. Now, along with Hugh Dickinson and Helen Fraser we share a large and lively group of PhD students who are using Machine Learning to, amongst other things, find Lensed Galaxies, improving angular resolution on Wide-field (but blurry) Extragalactic Surveys and to untangle the vast amounts of data for Ice Astrochemistry.
Complexity and Design (at the OU)
A highly interdisciplinary area involving fundamental research into the methods of complex systems science supported by research into the design of its applications.
Information extraction and data mining (at the OU)
This work was done under the EU FP7 Project: agINFRA: a data infrastructure to support agricultural scientific communities. I worked on information extraction from the legacy biodiversity literature.
Convolutional Neural Networks (at Bell Labs, NJ)
Initially for modelling the visual system, but I never got very far on this, instead becoming engrossed in projects that applied variants of the famous LeNet architecture created by Yann LeCun to a broad variety of problems in image recognition and signal processing
The last 2 were collaborative projects with NCR.
My unique contribution, apart from training software that ran like the Disney version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice and couldn't be stopped, was introducing training on “rubbish” to improve rejection performance.
Human Vision (at Imperial College and the Royal London Hospital with Keith Ruddock and Chris Kennard)
The application of psychophysics (the investigation of the relations between physical stimuli and sensation) to the understanding of the normal mechanisms of visual processing, but also to the study of visual abnormalities in order to offer practical assistance to clinical patients. This was experimental work using computer monitors, Maxwellian View Optical Systems , essentially an optical bench with mirrors, lenses, filters and light sources and the wonderful W. D. Wright Trichromatic Colorimeter built in the 1920s.
Lots!
At the Open University since 2006:
