Profile

We use cameras much like people use their eyes – to see things about us, to measure things, and to work out the shapes of objects.

I work in a field called “image analysis” which just means working out what things in images mean.  So for example, the way your digital camera or phone can detect a face and focus on it? That’s image analysis.

I work mainly with other scientists, analysing what’s in their pictures using computer algorithms, and measuring things for them. For example, if biologists want to measure the size of some plants, we can take pictures of them and write software to do these measurements for them automatically. This is important if you have thousands of plants to measure!

To me, getting computers to understand the world using vision is one of the hardest artificial intelligence challenges.

I work closely with biologists and mathematicians and engineers, so I’d probably have quite a few chats with those folks throughout the day for various projects. Quite a bit of science these days involves people from lots of backgrounds working together, which is cool.