Surrey academic selected as HP Innovation Research Award recipient
Wednesday 15 July 2009
The Award will fund new PhD research developing software to automatically understand photos and video, as a way of automatically generating digital artwork.
Dr John Collomosse, Lecturer in Computer Vision, University of Surrey, was recently selected as one of 59 academics in the world to receive a 2009 HP Labs Innovation Research Award, a programme designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.
Surrey will collaborate with HP Labs on a research initiative focused on creating artistic visualisations of home videos. Dr Collomosse, author of the winning proposal titled Artistic Rendering of Consumer Video and an academic from the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, will lead the collaboration project with HP Labs.
Dr John Collomosse comments: “One outcome will be a flowing, ambient screensaver that captures users’ experiences through artistic versions of their home videos. It will automatically select videos that have a common theme, allowing users to rediscover video clips lying forgotten on their computers.”
Dr Collomosse is based in Surrey’s Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing. Its aim is to advance the state of the art in multimedia signal processing and computer vision, with a focus on image, video and audio applications. The Centre, one of the largest in the UK, has about 70 members comprising academic and support staff, postdoctoral research fellow and PhD students. Its annual research income is in excess of £2 million, with about one half resourced by grants from EPSRC, EU and industry.
“Our goal with this programme is to collaborate with the brightest minds from around the world to tackle the industry’s most complex problems and push the frontiers of fundamental science,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP and director, HP Labs. “The University of Surrey has demonstrated outstanding achievement and a vision that will help inspire technological innovation and address the most complex challenges and opportunities facing the industry in the next decade.”
HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. More details about the HP Labs Innovation Research Program and worldwide award recipients are available at: http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2009_results.html
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