Perception, Language, Action
The 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
Theme Members

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

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 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

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

Associate Professor
School of Psychology
Dr Di Luca investigates the mechanisms of human perception using psychophysical methods and computational modeling. The goal of his research is to understand how the brain progressively builds the perception of the environment by picking up information through actions and by integrating sensations over time.
Personal website: http://massimilianodiluca.info/
Lab website: https://virtualrealitylab.n ...
- Email
- m.diluca@bham.ac.uk

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

Assistant Professor in Computer Science
School of Computer Science
- Email
- j.jiao@bham.ac.uk

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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