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Chris Town is an Affiliated Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory) where he primarily teaches Computer Vision and related courses to undergraduates and MPhil students. His current main research focus is on high performance mobile computer vision and on pattern recognition algorithms for the biological and medical sciences.

Academic interests

Chris Town’s academic interests include: 

• Computer Vision
• Pattern recognition
• Biometrics
• High performance deep learning
• Medical informatics.

Degrees obtained

• BA/MA, Cantab.
• PhD, Cantab.

Awards and prizes

• ICPRS best paper award, 2022.
• Wolfson College Senior Research Fellowship, 2009.
• BCS Distinguished Dissertation (PhD) Awards recipient, 2006.
• Wolfson College Junior Research Fellowship, 2005.
• Trinity College Rouse Ball Scholarship, 2005.
• ICVS best cognitive vision paper award, 2003.
• Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Industrial Fellowship, 2001.

Biography

Chris Town’s research lies at the nexus of computer vision, information retrieval, machine learning, and language processing. Together with Dr David Sinclair he pioneered the ontology based approach to automated visual information processing. His PhD work (supervised by Professor John Daugman OBE) and post-doctoral research in this area at Cambridge were honoured in the UK's distinguished dissertation competition, and led to the award of a Trinity College Rouse Ball Scholarship, an Industrial Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and a JRF at Wolfson College. He previously worked at AT&T Labs Research, where he reported directly to Dr David Belanger (AT&T Chief Scientist) and worked with Dr Yann LeCun (the pioneer of deep convolutional neural networks).

Chris is also a Fellow, Tutor and DoS at Wolfson College, as well as Chief Technology Officer of Imense Ltd, a high-tech company co-founded by him that develops novel image analysis, optical character recognition and document verification solutions.

He has many active interdisciplinary research collaborations with biologists, ecologists and medical researchers. Chris is a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.

Other interests

Photography, SCUBA diving, marine biology.