Senior academic and research fellow promotions announced

We are delighted to announce the following new academic and research fellow promotions in the Department of Computer Science.

Head of Department, Professor John Shawe-Taylor, sent a personal note of congratulations to his eight newly promoted colleagues: "I am so proud to see the leaders of tomorrow emerging from our ranks. All of those who been recognised for their outstanding achievements in this year's senior promotions' list are truly deserving."

Dr David Barber – Promotion to Professor of Machine Learning

David leads a team of around 10 PhD students at UCL on machine learning, with an emphasis on methodological developments. He is also Chief Scientific Officer at reinfer.io, an AI business developing next generation customer interaction and analytics engines.

David is fascinated by Artificial Intelligence and how to make computers smarter; we live in exciting times with rapid increases in data and compute resources, and David’s research supports solutions to grand challenges in AI like understanding text, images and video, and reasoning about the world around us, with digital assistants.

Dr Gabriel Brostow – Promotion to Professor of Machine Vision

Gabriel’s research group explores problems relating to Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. His research focus is on "Human in the Loop Computer Vision," for analysis and synthesis applications. This means having or finding satisfying answers to these questions about a system, whether interactive or fully automated: 

I) Does the system know the intended purpose of the data being captured? 

II) Can the system assess its own accuracy?

III) Does the system ask questions of users, when it's uncertain?

Gabriel’s research expertise can be applied to a variety of tough problems, including film and photo special effects (computational photography), action analysis (of people, animals, and cells), and authoring systems (for architecture, animation, presentations) that make the most of user effort.

Dr Sebastian Riedel – Promotion to Professor of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Sebastian is an Allen Distinguished Investigator, leading the Machine Reading Lab. He is also Head of Research at Bloomsbury AI.

Sebastian works on teaching machines how to read and reason, in the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning. Recently, he has been tackling these problems via forms of end-to-end differentiable program interpreters as well as adversarial regularisation. He is generally interested in deep learning, graphical models and “old-school” symbolic AI.

Dr Danail Stoyanov - Promotion to Professor of Robot Vision

Danail is currently working on vision problems related to deformable structure from motion, scene flow and photometric and geometric camera calibration. The nature of his work is mostly applied, and its primary objective is to contribute to improvements in surgical treatment for example by allowing advanced image guidance and control in robotic assisted surgery. He is also increasingly interested in using vision to enable in vivo biophotonic imaging modalities and to provide information for objective surgical skill evaluation and analysis.

Dr Emine Yilmaz – Promotion to Professor of Computer Science

Emine is a faculty fellow of the Alan Turing Institute on Data Science. She also works as a research consultant for Microsoft Research, Cambridge, and serves as one of the organisers of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) at UCL. Emine’s research interests lie in the areas of information retrieval, data mining, and applications of machine learning, probability and statistics. She is also a co-founder of the company, UserContext.AI, which focuses on user engagement, personalisation, inferring users interests and recommendation based on users histories and contents they have visited in the Web.

Dr Yue Jia – Promotion to Associate Professor

Yue Jia is co-founder and CEO of MaJiCKe, and a lecturer of software engineering at the Centre of Research on Evolution, Search and Testing (CREST). He is also part of UCL's Systems and Software Engineering Group.

Yue’s main research interests are in the areas of Mutation Testing, Mining Mobile App Store and Genetic Improvement (GI). He also has a broad range of research interests around the area of Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in which software engineering tasks are represented as optimisation problems and solved with automated techniques.

Dr Ilya Sergey – Promotion to Associate Professor

Ilya carries out research in programming language theory, including, but not limited to types, semantics, and software verification. He has recently focused on developing sound and scalable methodologies for building provably correct concurrent and distributed systems (with applications to blockchains and smart contracts).

Dr Vasileios Lampos – Promotion to Principal Research Fellow

Bill’s primary research focus is the transformation of user-generated content created by online activity (social media, search queries etc.) to collective or personalised inferences as well as enhanced interpretations of human behaviour. He is interested in interdisciplinary research tasks that can bring together the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and Natural Language Processing with various aspects in the domains of Health, Social Sciences and Economics.