David Corney
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Until then, I'm still working as a research fellow at the University of Surrey, in the Department of Computing. I've developed software to analyse digital photographs of leaves, using specimens kindly provided by botanists at Kew Gardens herbarium. The software analyses the shapes of leaves to aid identification and to allow further rigorous analysis. I am using and enhancing geometric morphometric algorithms alongside more general image processing methods. One current aim is to model relationships between leaf shape and climate, based on images of herbarium specimens.
Previously, I was a research fellow in the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology as part of Beau Lotto's group. I used various machine learning and statistical methods to investigate the human visual system. Why is it that we can see the world in such detail, with such robustness, and yet we still see optical illusions? These are not simply random errors of a imperfect instrument, but are systematic and consistent. They can tell us a lot about how the rest of the visual system works, and by extension, other modes of perception too. I developed a virtual visual ecology into which I could place "virtual animals". I let them adapt and evolved and learn to see, and then tested their perceptions and their internal workings. This model allowed me to investigate the perception of lightness, colour, depth and so on. Some of the work was described in this New Scientist article.
Until 2006, I was working in the area of information extraction and text mining in the UCL Computer Science department (where I also did my PhD). I developed the BioRAT software, which performs information extraction from biological literature. I was in the Bioinformatics Group at UCL and helped to organise "BioText", a workshop held in London (November 2005) to discuss the application of text mining to the life sciences.
I also played with Google Maps then, using them to display publication rates of UK universities in the life sciences. It provides a novel, visual interface to PubMed.
I also teach various aspects of computer science. Currently, I supervise online computer science undergraduate projects at the University of Hertfordshire.
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