🛠️ My job title at King’s College London is Senior Lecturer (≈Associate Professor) in Computational Humanities and AI Media. I work at the intersection of visual culture and computational practice. On the humanities side, I specialise in visual culture, with a focus on screen cultures: film and television, online video, and computer games. This is mostly under the umbrella of aesthetics, technoscience and historical poetics. On the computational side, my work mostly sits between cultural analytics and computational creativity, with a focus on the analysis and production of visual media through methods borrowed and adapted from computer vision and multi-modal machine learning more generally (the type of technologies that underpin what is now commonly called generative AI). My research combines these fields and their methods in various ways, the common thread being the notion of critical technical practice.
In my work I aim to integrate concepts from various theories of cinema, photography, aesthetics, and philosophy more generally, with advanced computational practice, such as computational modelling, time-series analysis, and machine learning. Some recent highlights:
- Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA), a project funded by the BFI in partnership with film and TV archives across the UK
- FrameSense, an open-source tool for processing large moving image collections into machine-readable datasets, developed with King’s Digital Lab
- My book Cinema and Machine Vision (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), a comprehensive account of my recent research
And a few earlier projects, still very much part of the story:
- An experimental AI-TV programme made in collaboration with BBC R&D
- A focal length classifier I built to test the idea of an optical perspective in computer vision
- This parametric supercut generator I made using shot-scale detection
I regularly present these and other Projects at various events. Some of these experiments and ideas have become projects and publications.
See more about specific research interests, or my contact details if you want to connect. And here is a short bio in the third person helpful for events and the web.