Dr Nicolas Pugeault he/him
Reader in Computer Vision and Machine Learning
Mission Priority Areas
I am fascinated by how humans use visual information to perceive the world we live in, make decisions and plan, and I am interested in how we can endow artificial intelligence with similar abilities. My group has been working on Computer Vision and AI, for example: how to analyse, model and predict motion from visual input; how to learn stable strategies from experimentation; how to analyse and model human motion; or how to identify marine specimens in underwater images.
I would primarily like to develop collaboration with life scientists, health experts or social scientists:
1. I recently developed an interest in computer vision for studying urban design and how people interact with it, and would love to pursue this problem. For example, a large-scale study of urban infrastructure from visual data and a study of how urban structures are used in practice from video data would be an interesting project.
2. I have studied human motion for several years, including sign language translation and emotion recognition, and I would love to expand this with an health or social science perspective, in particular towards designing a fine-grained model of human motion and pose that could provide rich information on, for example, breathing and elocution.
3. I am very interested in the application of computer vision to study animals, with previous projects including detecting what bird eat, recognising plankton and other marine animals. A project using visual data for example to monitor animal health or mood would be very interesting.
Over the last decade, I have graduated many PhD and MRes students, who all went on to have successful careers both in academia and industry.
Since I started in research, I have always worked in diverse and international groups, including a wide range of ethnicity, religion and a mix of gender. My group in Glasgow is similarly diverse, coming from all over the world. This diversity is in my view not only enriching our research and individual experience, but also essential in an age where AI is taking an increasingly important role in our life and algorithmic bias can have a severe impact.
I am very happy to meet to discuss possible collaborations on how we can use computer vision and AI, beyond the hype, to solve real problems.
