Researcher (Assistant Professor) in Computer Vision at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). Stuart's research focus is on Visual Reasoning to understand the layout of visual content from Iconography (e.g. Sketches) to 3D Scene understanding and their implications of methods of interaction. He is involved in the coordination and implementation of the MEMEX EU H2020 project for increasing social inclusion with Cultural Heritage. Stuart has previously held PostDoc positions at IIT, University College London (UCL) and the University of Surrey. Also at the University of Surrey Stuart was awarded his PhD. Stuart continues to hold an honorary position at UCL and UCL Digital Humanities and collaborates with researchers across universities and institutes, reviewing and organising workshops.

Stuart James

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About

Starting in 2019 as a Researcher (Assistant Professor) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Cultural Heritage following a Postdoctoral Researcher position at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) working on 3D scene understanding with Dr Alessio Del Bue. Prior to which Stuart worked at University College London (UCL) as a Research Associate working with Prof. Tim Weyrich working on 3D reconstruction of large relief art. While at the University of Surrey he worked as a Research Fellow working on Charting the Digital Lifespan – a big social data classification task through the fusion of social image and comments while exploring the social implications.

Stuart’s PhD completed in 2015, also at the University of Surrey, explored how Visual Narratives (Free-Hand sketched storyboards) can be used for Video Retrieval and Synthesis. Contributions involved approaches for Sketch-based Video retrieval and Dance Choreography Synthesis. He also holds a BSc in Computer Science with Games development from the University of Hull.

During 2013 he visited INESC-ID (IST), Portugal for an internship. The research project looked at expanding prior work and integrating the user into the process of choreographic video synthesis. This work focused on Human Computer Interaction developed and interactive process.

During his PhD and Post-doc positions at University of Surrey and UCL, Stuart has enthusiastically engaged with students through teaching opportunities. By working as a lab assistant or marking student work. He has assisted in Computer Vision, Robotics, Research Methods and Programming (C, C++) modules.

Stuart is a member of several professional bodies including ACM, IEEE, BCS; additionally part of specialist groups in research related fields. Stuart regularly peer reviewers for: BMVC, ICIAP, GCH conferences and workshops. As well as the Computers & Graphics and IEEE Transaction on MultiMedia journals.

Additionally, Stuart has worked at JCS Technology for over ten years as IT Manager. Organising the lab infrastructure and services while making informed purchasing decisions. This experience has broadened Stuart’s interaction with industrial technologies and given an understanding which inturn has been used to guide research infrastructure.

PhD Students

  • Supervisor of Mohamed Dahy Abdelaher Elkhouly

    Visual scene understanding through geometry

    with Dr Alessio Del Bue (IIT)

  • Collaborative supervisor of Daniele Giunchi

    How we can sketch in Virtual Environments

    with Prof. Anthony Steed (UCL)

Latest Blog Post

10 Jan 2020 . research . And it begins... MEMEX Comments

Image from Flickr (Terry Kearney)

Today we had our Kick-off Meeting for the MEMEX EU Project here is the abstract:

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for...

Previous posts

newsfeed

  • December 2019

    Coordinating and Implementing MEMEX EU Project

  • December 2019

    Rejoined Visual Geometry and Modelling Lab of IIT

  • January 2019

    Researcher (Assist. Prof) in Cultural Heritage in IIT

  • April 2017

    Moved to Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)

  • April 2017

    Became Honorary Research Associate at UCL

  • October 2016

    Joined UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

  • April 2016

    Invited to Rank Prize Symposium on Computer Vision and Video Effects

  • April 2016

    Graduated as Doctor of Philosophy

  • October 2015

    Research Associate at UCL with Prof. Tim Weyrich

  • September 2015

    Defended PhD Thesis

Latest Publication

2019 Mixing realities for sketch retrieval in Virtual Reality

Users within a Virtual Environment often need support designing the environment around them with the need to find relevant content while remaining immersed. We, therefore, focus on the familiar sketch-based interaction to support the process of content placing and specifically investigate how interactions from a tablet or desktop translate into the virtual environment. To understand sketching interaction within a virtual environment, we compare different methods of sketch interaction, i.e., 3D mid-air sketching, 2D sketching on a virtual tablet, 2D sketching on a fixed virtual whiteboard, and 2D sketching on a real tablet. The user remains immersed within the environment and queries a database containing detailed 3D models and replace them into the virtual environment. Our results show that 3D mid-air sketching is considered to be a more intuitive method to search a collection of models; while the addition of physical devices creates confusion due to the complications of their inclusion within a virtual environment. While we pose our work as a retrieval problem for 3D models of chairs, our results are extendable to other sketching tasks for virtual environments.

Accepted at VRCAI'19 in Brisbane, Austrailia.

See full publication index

Contact

To find out more about our research you can find me at...

Visual Geometry and Modelling Lab

Center for Human Technologies - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Via Enrico Melen, 83, 16152 Genova GE