Thor List @
I
am a Research Fellow on the CAVIAR project at the Institute for Perception, Action and
Behaviour at Edinburgh University working
on my PhD with my supervisor Professor
Bob Fisher.
The aim of my PhD is to visually track objects in close proximity, and more specifically during human interaction, by introducing a hierarchical symbolic scene description, created by many competing low-level image feature detectors controlled by higher level cognitive processes, from which scale-independent object and event tracking and recognition can be carried out in a distributed fashion.
Publications
See my list of publications
Research
CAVIAR
The EU project CAVIAR is funding my PhD research. We are creating a generic architecture for analysing people’s behaviour and intentions in crowded scenes such as shopping centres, public squares and streets. The motivation is two-fold - both for exploiting the commercial aspects of understanding customer intentions and to automate monitoring of people for security reasons. I am involved in constructing the overall system architecture as well as the more specific object tracking part, highly correlated with the topic of my PhD research.
Computer Vision Markup Language
In the process of creating the CAVIAR systems architecture I am proposing an open communication language, enabling separate software systems to communicate about cognitive and low-level computer vision, called Computer Vision Markup Language (CVML).
For more details please visit the CVML website (hosted by Mindmakers.org) or read the CVML paper (ICPR 2004).
Psyclone
One of the main problems with Artificial Intelligence is integration. Many academic research groups and commercial businesses have successfully applied A.I. to solve usually very specific problems, but there is a distinct lack of cooperation between even closely related fields, primarily since no standards exists.
Psyclone is trying to close the gap between research groups and the industry by providing platform independent and highly distributable A.I. middleware. It uses advanced scheduling blackboard technology including streaming media support, to allow both internal and external modules as well as third party products (via AIRPlugs) to communicate locally and globally. It runs on multiple platforms such as Windows, Macintosh, Linux and other UNIX compatible, and supports external modules written in C++, Java and soon to come many other languages, such as Python.
Psyclone is developed by CMLabs (Communicative
Machines) and is free for academic and non-commercial use. It is already
being used for research around the world, including
Psyclone implements the AIR Protocol and is a fully functional
AIRServer, as detailed in the Mindmakers’ OpenAIR specification. Also
available as addon modules are miniAIR
for small footprint Java implementations and picoAIR for Java mobile phones.
CMLabs
have made a large part of its generic source code available for free at the SourceForge project CoreLibrary.
Read about Psyclone in SIGGRAPH Quarterly and in my publications.
Cognitive Tracking in Computer Vision
Tracking objects is a cornerstone in Computer Vision and this is done quite well with many new techniques recently being developed. However, tracking usually breaks down when objects get very close and start to interact, obstructing the gathering of potentially crucial information.
The main research topic of my PhD will be to enable cognitive vision systems to apply human-like understanding of scenes and events and thereby be able to better estimate what actually transpires when objects are too close to be resolved and tracked by normal Computer Vision Tracking.
MindMakers.org
For the past 2 years I have been working on creating a forum for generic A.I system development. There is a strong lack of general solutions for A.I. type problems, both for research and commercial products.
MindMakers.org is an organisation to make people from every A.I. related field come together and join the effort to create standardised tools and platforms for creating any kind of A.I. solution.
Please, visit MindMakers.org and see how you can participate.
People
I have had the pleasure to work with some amazing people during the past years.
My astrophysics supervisor Prof. Bernard Jones, for whom I also
worked with in
Dr. Mark Lucente was the person who
convinced me to move to
The team behind CMLabs.com and MindMakers.org, who I met at Soliloquy consists of Kris Thorisson, John Dipirro, Chris Pennock and Anjan Ray.
And of course my wife and soul mate,
Dr. Jennifer List, who every day
continues to light my way and enrich my universe.
Background
See my professional page for more information about my background.
Document last updated: Thor List, Saturday, 17 December,
2005