Research interests:My research interests can be largely summarised as being in vision for HCI and related signal processing areas, such as Computer Vision (face tracking, object tracking, Active Appearance Models, 3D lip tracking, gesture recognition, driver assistance technology, background subtraction / novelty detection, thermal imaging), Affective Computing (affective state recognition using video, audio and physiological measures, bloodflow estimation), Multimodal HCI, Audio-Video Speech Processing, Image Processing, and Signal Processing (signal fusion / integration).
A lot of what drives my research interests and that of our group is the basic notion that HCI systems of the future will sense the human user, the user’s state and adapt to it (in whatever way is useful and suitable for a particular application). In particular, the young field of affective computing and its interaction with HCI is an area of research focus and future direction. Along the way, we need to solve quite a number of problems, be it in computer vision, signal processing, affective computing, bio-engineering, speech processing or others. The aspect of multimodal, multi-sensor systems also plays a central role, where the multiplicity leads to more accuracte and more robust systems, capable of being used in real-world applications, that outperform single modality, single sensor systems.
I collaborate closely with a number of researchers at local institutions (other departments/schools at the University of Canberra, ANU, ADFA, NICTA, CSIRO, Australian Institute of Sports) as well as nationally (CSIRO Sydney, Black Dog Institute Sydney, University of Western Sydney, Flinders University, University of Adelaide) and internationally (Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Maryland, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics). Postgraduate students often spend 3-6 months of their PhD studies as a visiting researcher at one of these institutions.
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Bio:In the past, I worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Seeing Machines, a spin-off company from ANU and RSISE, as a researcher for the NICTA Canberra Research Lab, as well as for the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Germany. My PhD was awarded by the ANU in 2004 for work on audio-video automatic speech recognition, including a real-time stereo vision lip tracking algorithm. I was awarded the PhD of the Year award in 2004 by the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA). Much of my work has been on and continues to be on face and facial feature tracking from a HCI point of view.
I am or have been the (co-)supervisor of 9 PhD students, 4 Masters students, and several summer scholars and other interns. I have (co-)authored about 70 papers and book chapters.
I have been or am on the organisation committee of several workshops and conferences, including VisHCI, NRTL, Interspeech and AVSP. I regularly review papers for top international conferences and journals (e.g. IEEE Trans. PAMI, Pattern Recognition), and have been an examiner for several PhD theses (external to the ANU).
I am an avid bushwalker and cyclist and enjoy being outdoors whenever I can. |
