Researcher (Assistant Professor) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Cultural Heritage in the Center for Cultural Heritage Technology (CCHT). Following a Postdoctoral Researcher position also at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) working on 3D scene understanding with Dr Alessio Del Bue. Previously Stuart was a Research Associate at University College London (UCL) working with Prof. Tim Weyrich. While at the University of Surrey Stuart completed his PhD and a post doc with Dr John Collomosse. Stuart's research focus is on Visual Big Data problems in the area of Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Digital Humanities. Prior projects have covered 3D Reconstruction, Texture Analysis, Social Media classification, Sketch-based Video Retrieval and Human Pose Retrieval and Domain Adaptation.

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

25 Sep 2019 . research . Review in a week* Comments

Image from Flickr (vickysandoval22)

For a long time now, I have been reviewing articles at a variety of journals and conferences, which is “usually” tracked within publons. While I try hard to make sure that I get reviews completed before the deadline often, when it comes to Journals, this is accomplished in the final few days before the deadline. This creates a significant stress and anxiety to my academic life, as I’m constantly worrying about the tasks that I have to do, and in some cases staying up late to get the review completed. Therefore, as I review my activities,...

Previous posts

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  • 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

  • February 2017

    ‘Texture Stationarization: Turning Photos into Tileable Textures’ accpeted to Eurographics’17

  • October 2016

    Joined UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

  • August 2016

    Paper ‘Evolutionary Data Purification for Social Media Classification’ accpeted to ICPR’16

  • July 2016

    Attended SIGGRAPH

  • April 2016

    Attended Rank Prize Symposium on Computer Vision and Video Effects

  • April 2016

    Graduated as Doctor of Philosophy

  • February 2016

    Presented poster at SketchX ‘Towards Sketched Visual Narratives for Retrieval’

  • October 2015

    Moved to UCL to work with Professor Tim Weyrich

  • September 2015

    Successfully 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

Drop me an email if you are interested in my research or have any questions!