Perception, Language, Action

Life SciencesThe research theme “Perception, Language, Action” brings together researchers in the research specialisation areas of Computer Vision, Imaging, Natural Language Processing, Embedded Robotics, and Cognitive Science.

While the individual research areas focus on specific theoretical questions and related applications, the areas of Computer Vision and Imaging Science have always been closely related by sharing techniques, methodology and tools related to capturing data (in the form of images, videos, 3D, multimodal and multispectral data), modelling and analysing visual information.

The aim of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to develop computational models for analysing and generating human language. While NLP, Computer Vision and Imaging Sciences have traditionally been separate research fields with quite specific theoretical and methodological underpinnings, in the era of machine learning, big data and large language/vision models, parts of the methodology and tools have started to converge. This also coincides with synergistic effects exploited in multimodal datasets/models leveraging semantics from the language models to facilitate image and video data understanding.

Research in Robotics encompasses fundamental challenges in developing systems that can interact with the environments either through manipulation and/or navigation. While some research problems can be quite specific, in a more general setting of Cognitive robotics/systems, vision and language need to be brought together with robotics to enable perception-action cycle.

Overall, this organisation of the researchers around the theme “Perception, Language, Action” creates a collaborative network that is of interest to all involved, exchanging the experiences and sharing the common tools (especially related to large generative models, data and techniques) and developing larger projects that require expertise that go beyond the narrow domains.

The group has proved to be an important player in AI-driven multidisciplinary initiatives globally, as most of such projects require AI/ML techniques that involve perception, language and/or action.

Theme Lead

Professor Hamid Dehghani

Professor Hamid Dehghani

Professor of Medical Imaging

School of Computer Science

Professor Hamid Dehghani is Professor of Medical Imaging at the School of Computer Science. He is part of the Centre for Human Brain Health as well as the Healthcare Technologies Institute (HTI). He has made world-leading contributions in Biophotonics, as used for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. His research focuses on biomedical imaging and in particular in the development of novel ...

Telephone
+44 (0) 121 414 8728
Email
h.dehghani@cs.bham.ac.uk

Theme Members

 

Dr Ruchit Agrawal

Dr Ruchit Agrawal

Assistant Professor

School of Computer Science

Dr Ruchit Agrawal is an Assistant Professor and Head of CS Outreach at the University of Birmingham Dubai. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford, where he worked on Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare. He received his PhD in Computer Science under the prestigious Marie-Curie scholarship from the Queen Mary University of London. Dr Agrawal is an ...

Email
r.r.agrawal@bham.ac.uk

Dr Mubashir Ali

Dr Mubashir Ali

Assistant Professor (Education)

School of Computer Science

Mubashir Ali is an Assistant Professor (Education) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. His research interest includes machine learning, data science, big data analytics, smart services for smart cities, smart energy management, natural language processing, resource development for low resource languages, social media analysis, sentiment analysis, and software ...

Email
m.ali.16@bham.ac.uk

Professor Howard Bowman

Professor Howard Bowman

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

School of Psychology

Professor Bowman applies the methods of Cognitive Neuroscience, especially EEG and Neural Modelling, to understanding a spectrum of Cognitive phenomena, including conscious perception, temporal attention and subliminal search. Much of his work focuses on verifying the simultaneous Type/ Serial Token theory of temporal attention and working memory encoding, which he developed with Brad Wyble.

Prof ...

Email
bowmanh@adf.bham.ac.uk

Dr Hyung Jin Chang

Dr Hyung Jin Chang

Associate Professor
Head of External Partnerships of Computer Science

School of Computer Science

Dr Hyung Jin Chang is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. He received a PhD in machine learning and computer vision at Perception and Intelligence Lab, Seoul National University, in 2013. As a post-doctoral researcher, he worked at Imperial College London and was involved in several EU projects (EU FP7 GRANT 612139 and EU H2020 GRANT 643783) ...

Email
h.j.chang@bham.ac.uk

Dr Yue Feng

Dr Yue Feng

Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence

School of Computer Science

Dr Yue Feng is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests lie in natural language processing and information retrieval, especially on large language model powered AI agents, multimodal foundation models, trustworthy AI.

She is always looking for highly motivated PhD students and research assistant. Please feel free to get in ...

Email
y.feng.6@bham.ac.uk

Dr Jianbo Jiao

Dr Jianbo Jiao

Assistant Professor in Computer Science

School of Computer Science

Jianbo Jiao is an Assistant Professor in Computer Vision and Machine Learning in the School of Computer Science at University of Birmingham. Before joining Birmingham, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Biomedical Image Analysis (BioMedIA) group and the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford, working on the projects SeeBiByte and VisualAI.

His research is mainly about ...

Email
j.jiao@bham.ac.uk

Dr Venelin Kovatchev

Dr Venelin Kovatchev

Assistant Professor

School of Computer Science

Dr. Venelin Kovatchev is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham and a member of the ELLIS Society. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

He is interested in data-centric NLP and topics such as dynamic evaluation frameworks for NLP, active learning, unit testing for NLP and AI, adversarial attacks, data ...

Email
v.o.kovatchev@bham.ac.uk

Dr Alexander Krull

Dr Alexander Krull

Assistant Professor of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

School of Computer Science

Dr. Alexander Krull is Assistant Professor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham's School of Computer Science. He is a member of COMPARE. His research focuses on developing advanced methods for image analysis and denoising, particularly for microscopy applications. Dr. Krull is a pioneer in establishing self-supervised and unsupervised denoising methods that ...

Email
a.f.f.krull@bham.ac.uk

Professor Mark Lee

Professor Mark Lee

Professor of Artificial Intelligence

School of Computer Science

Professor Mark Lee is a professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Computer Science. His research interests are focussed on Natural Language Processing. He is specifically interested in Sentiment Analysis of text, the automatic identification and understanding of metaphor and the effects of pragmatic inference in dialogue processing. More recently he has been investigating the ...

Email
m.g.lee@bham.ac.uk

Professor Ales Leonardis

Professor Ales Leonardis

Chair of Robotics at the School of Computer Science

School of Computer Science

Ales Leonardis is Chair of Robotics at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham and Co-Director of the Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre at the University of Birmingham. He is also Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljanaand an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology. He was a ...

Telephone
+44(0)121 414 8556
Email
a.leonardis@cs.bham.ac.uk

Dr Jian Liu

Dr Jian Liu

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science

Dr Jian Liu received his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. His research interests include fundamental questions of neural computation, computational neuroscience, and brain-inspired computation for artificial intelligence, as well as applications to robotics, medicine, and brain-machine interface.

Fo ...

Email
j.liu.22@bham.ac.uk

Dr Qingjie Meng

Dr Qingjie Meng

Assistant Professor

School of Computer Science

Dr Qingjie Meng is an Assistant Professor in machine learning and AI in healthcare. She received a PhD in BioMedIA group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London. After PhD, she worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Department of Computing, Imperial College London.

Her research stands at the interface between AI, machine learning and medical image analysis. She has worked on ...

Email
m.qingjie@bham.ac.uk

Dr Rickson C. Mesquita

Dr Rickson C. Mesquita

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science

 

Rickson Mesquita is an Associate Professor of Medical Imaging at the School of Computer Science. His research focuses on developing and combining computational methods, biophysical modelling, and instrumentation for measuring brain function. He is particularly interested in diffuse optical techniques, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and diffuse correlation ...

Email
r.c.mesquita@bham.ac.uk

Dr Samuel Antonio Montero Hernandez

Dr Samuel Antonio Montero Hernandez

Assistant Professor

School of Computer Science

Dr. Montero-Hernandez's work primarily involves developing and applying computational models for causal discovery algorithms. He is also interested in brain connectivity methods, specifically those that utilize functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data. He contributes to developing algorithms for the quality control of fNIRS signals, ensuring the integrity and precision of the data used ...

Email
s.montero@bham.ac.uk

Dr. Qamar Natsheh

Dr. Qamar Natsheh

Assistant Professor (Flying Faculty)

School of Computer Science

Qamar is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, serving as Flying Faculty between the Edgbaston and Dubai campuses. She is also a member of the Perception, Language, Action (PLA) group. Her research interests span medical imaging, image processing technologies, computer vision, and data science.

Email
q.natsheh@bham.ac.uk

Professor Eyal Ofek

Professor Eyal Ofek

Chair of Computer Science

School of Computer Science

Prof. Ofek research interests include usage of computer vision and sensing for Human Computer Interaction and Mixed Reality research, haptics rendering and its perception and robotics.

His contributions include the development of the world’s first time-of-flight depth camera (used by Microsoft and MagicLeap), design and development of the first street-side mapping service, development of ...

Telephone
+44 (0)7570 633381
Email
e.ofek@bham.ac.uk

Dr Felipe Orihuela-Espina

Dr Felipe Orihuela-Espina

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science

School of Computer Science

Dr. Felipe Orihuela-Espina is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2005. Afterwards, he moved to Mexico where he was appointed lecturer at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico (UAEMex). He joined Imperial College as a research associate in 2007 and later in 2011 became postdoctoral ...

Email
f.orihuela-espina@bham.ac.uk

Professor Kashif Rajpoot

Professor Kashif Rajpoot

Deputy Head of School of Computer Science (for Dubai)
Professor of Medical AI

Dubai Campus

Kashif Rajpoot is Deputy Head of School of Computer Science (for Dubai) and a Professor of Medical AI.

His research focuses on developing solutions for problems in medical image analysis, cardiac electrophysiology, computational pathology, artificial intelligence, and data science. He has published over 60 research papers in leading journals and conferences of his domain.

Email
k.m.rajpoot@bham.ac.uk

Dr Phillip Smith

Dr Phillip Smith

Associate Professor

School of Computer Science

Phillip Smith is an associate professor and the Head of Student Development and Support in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

Phillip is interested in natural language processing, in particular, sentiment analysis. Phillip is investigating how discourse function affects supervised machine learning classifiers trained to tackle this problem.

Please follow the link ...

Email
p.smith.7@cs.bham.ac.uk

Dr Jizheng Wan

Dr Jizheng Wan

Assistant Professor (Education)

School of Computer Science

Jizheng is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. His research is mainly about using ML/DL for Ontology Learning and other NLP-related tasks. Before joining Birmingham, he spent the last 13 years working in the IT department in various Universities – managing the Research IT team/function to support various research projects across the ...

Email
j.wan.1@bham.ac.uk