Adrian F. Clark's Home Page

Biography

Adrian Clark obtained a BSc in Physics (first class, and winner of the Lab Prize) at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1979 and a PhD in Image Processing from Queen Elizabeth College (now merged with Kings College; see the Wikipedia for a brief history of QEC), University of London in 1983. After postdoctorate research into parallel image processing on the mini-DAP at Kings College, he worked for British Aerospace (now BAe Systems) during 1985-88, researching in the general area of object recognition. ;-) He joined the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of Essex in 1988, where he is now a Reader.

During 1991-93, he acted as Convenor of BSI IST/31/-/6, a panel of experts involved in the development of the International Standard for Image Processing and Interchange (IS 12087), and was editor of the first part of that Standard. He is a former secretary of the British Machine Vision Association and now coordinates its web-site. He has also chaired Technical Committee 5 (Benchmarking and Software) of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He is a fervent evangelist for the quantitative evaluation and comparison of algorithms in computer vision and image processing, being involved in the organization of all significant events in the area for over a decade.

This interest in performance characterization was one of the major purposes for setting up PEIPA, the Pilot European Image Processing Archive, which provides software, imagery, and support material to the computer vision and image processing communities. He has also moderated The Pixel, a bulletin board and email list concerned with computer vision and image processing, since 1989. In addition to the BMVA, he is a member of the EPSRC College, of the IEEE and the Institute of Physics.

Contact details

Snail-mail: Department of Electronic Systems Engineering
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
Essex
CO4 3SQ
U. K.
Telephone: +44 1206 872432
Fax: +44 1206 872900
Email: alien /at/ essex.ac.uk
Web page: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alien

If you're on the Essex campus, my office is in the big white building on Square 1, the lowest of the five main squares. Walk into the building from square 1 and turn left in the foyer, then follow the corridor round to the right, which means you'll be heading away from square 1. Go through the door which leads to the staff offices, and my office is the second-last one on the right. If I'm not in, I usually leave a note above the name panel to the right of my door.

Research

Recent years have been fairly quiet on the research front as I have been heavily involved in administration, managing our postgraduage schemes and developing new courses. However, in recent months I have been able to get back to my research -- which is, after all, why I work in a university.

Much of research explores the interplay between computer graphics (VR) and computer vision, two seemingly disparate disciplines that are really very closely related. Computer graphics involves taking 3D geometry and surface descriptions and producing 2D images of them; vision often involves the inverse operation, taking 2D images and trying to figure out the 3D geometry that appears in them. The second problem is undoubtedly the harder of the two and circumventing the ill-posed nature of the problem is one of the fascinations of working in the area.

In the summer of 2006, I became interested in bioinformatics, trying to understand how biological systems function through analysis of high-throughput biological techniques such as genome sequencing. In a sense, this returns to my original interests of working out how the detail of how things work, but addressing biological rather than physical systems. The pattern recognition and quantitative evaluation techniques used in my vision research turn out to be directly applicable to microarray data. I haven't got very far yet -- I'm still getting to grips with the biology and the biologists' terminology -- but it's very interesting.

Recent externally-funded research has encompassed areas such as stochastic techniques for spectral identification in remotely-sensed spectra and hyperspectral imagery; model-based image coding; pilot landing aids for civil aircraft; face recognition; and shared virtual worlds using VRML and IP multicasting. All EPSRC-funded projects have received good ratings and I have a good record of working with industry.

Specific things my colleagues and I are doing in my research lab, the Vision and Synthetic Environments Laboratory ("VASE Lab"), include:

When one starts to apply vision techniques "in anger" (i.e., not just to test cases in a research lab), one quickly runs into the problem that the techniques rarely perform as well as the literature suggests. Moreover, when connecting together techniques, one often finds that statistics of the data required by one "good" technique are difficult to produce from other "good" ones. This has led me to a long-standing involvement in designing vision systems and characterizing their performance; and, more recently, in exploring techniques that can construct vision systems automatically using Genetic Programming.
The problem with conventional virtual reality (VR) is that it is totally unrealistic: the user either wears shutter glasses and views a monitor (or, if one is exceptionally lucky, a CAVE), or wears an expensive head-mounted display that ties him or her to a fairly beefy computer. A major theme of our recent work is untethered VR; this ties in (ho, ho) rather well with the vision-based research mentioned above as vision is also, of course, inherently untethered. To achieve untethered VR, we need a computer that is small enough to be carried or, better, worn; and so we have developed a theme of research into wearable computing. In particular, we are using a wearable computer equipped with suitable sensors as a wearable augmented reality tour guide for archaeological sites.
Devising a framework for constructing user interfaces and applications for wearable computers that is able to accept input and deliver output via several media, and which is able to adapt to the user's environment. We believe that this framework, Sulawesi, is the first general-purpose multi-model, contact-aware user interface framework. Sulawesi supports textual or spoken inputs and is able to switch between textual and spoken output on the fly. It also interfaces to position-sensing devices and body-worn movement sensors, and hence is able to provide location-based output (imagine being told Remember to buy some milk on the way home by your wearable as you leave work) and to switch between output modalities depending on the context: for example, Sulawesi normally switches from visual to spoken output when it realizes the user is moving as it's pretty annoying to have a visual interface doing things in front of your eyes when walking or driving! More recently, we have started trying to monitor the habits of computer use that people develop, often sub-consciously, and have the machine adapt to them -- context-aware computing. The aim here is to make the computer much more proactive, obtaining and organizing the information that user needs, say, in anticipation of it being required.

Do take a look at the VASE Lab projects page to find out more and see what else we're doing.

Teaching

The Essex system of institutional study ("sabbatical") leave means that I have taught a wide range of subjects over the years, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Subjects I've lectured include (in no particular order): digital signal processing; real-time computing; C, C++, Java, Tcl/Tk; software engineering; parallel computing; human-computer interaction; and communication skills.

My current lecturing commitments are:

Both EE222 and EE322 are lectured to students in our Computer Science Department in addition to my own.

I have always been active in course and curriculum development, right from my early days as an academic, when I had scripting languages form part of our programming and software engineering offerings. I developed my Department's popular MSc in Computer and Information Networks and conceived much of its content; this attracts almost half our MSc student intake. I had major involvement in what is now our undergraduate degree in the area of Computer Games, and introduced our undergraduate degree in Computer and Network Security.

I lecture on the annual EPSRC Summer School on Computer Vision, and am one of the three-man team that manages it. From 2006 onwards, I'm also organising a student papers conference for the BMVA, in which papers are written, presented and reviewed by research students.

I am currently external examiner for MSc schemes offered by the School of Electronics and Physical Sciences at the University of Surrey. I'm a regular external examiner for PhD theses in the areas of computer vision, image processing and wearable computing.

Administration

I have held most positions of responsibility within his Department, including spells in charge of all postgraduate schemes; departmental facilities; and all courses in the areas of software and computer networks. I've also been involved in a number of University-wide committees, and have attended the University's "leadership" course, usually reserved for heads of departments.

My major administration role is currently Graduate Director, which means I manage all the Department's courses for MSc and MRes students and oversee the progress of research students. I also manage research student admissions to the department.

As my department and Computer Science are working towards a merger in August 2007, I'm working on the committee that is integrating the two departments' teaching. I'm keen to expand the range of courses the new department will offer, re-invigorating science at Essex.

About me

I'm a keen golfer, playing at Stoke-by-Nayland golf club and trying to get my handicap back down to 7, which is what it was when I was an 18-year-old! I also play tennis with my wife, Christine, who runs the Phoenix tennis club and beats me easily (sigh).

My other main leisure interests are photography, both still and video, travelling and architecture (well, looking at interesting buildings and photographing them). I'm a member of Alresford Camera Club -- but don't confuse enthusiasm with talent: I regularly fail to do well in the club competitions. ;-) I also live in hope of finding the time and equipment to scan my old slides and put them on the Web.

I'm generally a lousy cook but occasionally manage to throw together a Thai meal. Thanks to Saint Delia, I also bake all my own bread. Sadly, I developed an allergy to alcohol in my mid-20s, which makes me popular ferrying people to and from events around Christmas.

I write with a pen. You know, ink and stuff. Italic. Nib like a small spade.

My office is a Microsoft-free environment: I've been using a Macintosh since 2002, Linux since 1993, Emacs since 1988, and L^AT_EX since 1984, so their idiosyncracies are second nature to me. Before coming to Essex, I was a VAX/VMS afficionado and I still regard it as the pinnacle of user-friendly operating systems. Why Microsoft-free? Well, I just don't like WYSIWYG word processors and Word is one of the worse ones: extraordinarily clunky to use, difficult to become proficient with, and full of bizarre features. In any case, how do people put up with the visual quality of Word documents? No ligatures, as far as I can see; precious little kerning; illegible maths; difficult-to-use table of contents generation; and apparently discouraging any attempts to impose document structure. As for the other tools -- well, I've yet to see a non-trivial spreadsheet that didn't had a bug in it. The closest thing to a saving grace is PowerPoint but there are better alternatives out there. Things might improve when the tools use XML-based document formats but I'm doubtful.

If you're interested, I attack Word documents with OpenOffice.org, antiword, catdoc or, as a last resort, strings. On the other hand, my PhD thesis still runs through L^AT_EX without any problems: can users of any other typesetting systems claim such a long life for their documents?

I program principally in C and scripting languages. I do program in C++ and Java from time to time but always end up coming back to C. To be honest, C++ is something of an abomination as it's far to easy to avoid using its object-oriented features, and the way that much of the executable code ends up being forced to reside in the header file makes me shudder. On the other hand, Java is a nice language with generally well-conceived features (but still no operator overloading; definitely a mistake) -- it's a shame its class libraries are so difficult to work with. Compared to C++ and Java, C is small, portable and easy to work in. I guess many will regard me as something of a dinosaur because, although I understand object-oriented programming and can work within its strictures, I don't particularly like them as they tend to obsfuscate the underlying algorithms, which is surely the most important part of a program. Moreover, looking at others' code, I rarely find much evidence of code re-use, which is surely one of the raisons d'etre for object-oriented programming. I seem to be able to achieve as much code re-use in ISO C, and that compiles much more quickly -- and usually executes more quickly too. Or maybe it's that I can "write Fortan in any language," as the saying goes. In any case, my coding style naturally hides data, supposedly the other big win for OO languages.

For about the last decade, most of my general programming has been in scripting languages as I find they are very effective for turning out working code quickly. I've worked in Perl since its early days but switched to Tcl/Tk in early 2004 (I needed to use its "safe interpreter") and find it extraordinarily effective. It has fallen out of favour in recent years but continues quietly to be improved by its small but dedicated developer community and is now a solid and capable language, able to do anything from GUI construction to data logging.

I have close ties with the Colchester Archaeology Trust (CAT) who do most of the excavations in the area; indeed, I'm a member of the Trust's management committee. (Colchester was the capital of Britain in Roman times, in case you didn't know.) My interest in such things probably comes from being born and brought up in Hexham and the North Tyne valley. Christine and I put together the CAT web-site and, along with a couple of colleagues, I brought live video of CAT's excavations to the Internet in 1997. We believe this was the first such live excavation.

You might like to look at a VRML 1 model of Adrian's head which was kindly captured during BMVC97, held at Essex, using a C3D model 2020 system developed by the now-defunct Turing Institute in Glasgow.