Background

I graduated with a First Class Honours in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh in July 2003. My undergraduate dissertation - “Reconstruction of the Unobserved Sides of Building Columns” - was supervised by Bob Fisher in the School of Informatics.

My PhD began in October 2003 at the Visual Media Research Group, supervised by Adrian Hilton. The VMRG is part of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey, and is focused on researching technologies aimed at the entertainment and communication industries.

I spent three months on a research placement at the Max Planck Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany, working with Marcus Magnor and his Graphics, Optics and Vision research group (July-September 2004).

The goal of my PhD research was to develop a system capable of synthesising high quality three-dimensional representations of people. I completed my first 3D video system in May 2005 which I then presented at the Conference on Visual Media Production in London in November 2005.

I have published several more papers on topics related to free-viewpoint video in the time since. I have also been involved in the iview project (collaborating with the BBC), which aims to allow free-viewpoint replay of live outdoor scenes (focussing on football matches).

I left Surrey in September 2006 to write my thesis back home in Scotland. At the beginning of May 2007 I began work as a postdoc at the University of Dundee working with Manuel Trucco on multiple view video research, specifically to design a new scaleable multiple camera acquisition system, which was completed in December 2007.

In March 2008 I joined the Human Communication Technologies Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, as a research fellow working with Sidney Fels on the MyView and OpenVL projects. We are working with Bell Canada to create new broadcast technology for multi-view hypervideo, researching technologies in Computer Vision, HCI, Multimedia and Computer Graphics.

I began teaching Computer Graphics in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for the University of British Columbia in January 2009. The course is heavily practical, tasking the students to create a 3D model of a building on UBC's campus, then design a city containing the other students' models. The final task is to capture a video of a fly-through of their city.