Ethics in AI Lunchtime Seminars - Introducing the work of Professor Philip Torr

Professor Philip Torr

Ethics in AI Lunchtime Research Seminar, Wednesday 17th January @ 12:30pm (GMT) with Professor Philip Torr (University of Oxford)

Abstract: This lunchtime seminar is an introduction to Professor Phil Torr’s work into cutting edge computer vision and AI technology. Phil is Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI. He was appointed ‘Turing AI World Leading Research Fellow’ in 2021, researching how deep neural networks, a form of AI that is ever more ubiquitous in technologies such as autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis, can be made more robust and less vulnerable to adversarial interference. He is the Group leader of the Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford, with the aim to engage in state of the art research into the mathematical theory of computer vision and artificial intelligence, but to keep the mathematical research relevant to the needs of society. A particular emphasis of the group has been on real time understanding and reconstruction of the world around using mobile cameras, such as those on drones, intelligent glasses or other robots. 

We will run each seminar in a hybrid format, allowing audiences to join in-person or online. Please register via the link below to reserve your space. 

Registration Required

Professor Philip Torr did his PhD (DPhil) at the Robotics Research Group of the University of Oxford under Professor David Murray of the Active Vision Group. He worked for another three years at Oxford as a research fellow, and still maintains close contact as visiting fellow there.

He left Oxford to work for six years as a research scientist for Microsoft Research, first in Redmond, USA, in the Vision Technology Group, then in Cambridge founding the vision side of the Machine Learning and Perception Group. He then became a Professor in in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Oxford Brookes University, where he has brought in over one million pounds in grants for which he is PI. Recently in 2013, Philip returned to Oxford as full professor where he has established the Torr Vision group.

He won several awards including the Marr prize (the highest honour in vision) in 1998. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder. Recently, together with members of his group, he has won several other awards including an honorary mention at the NIPS 2007 conference for the paper 'P. Kumar, V. Kolmorgorov, and P.H.S. Torr, An Analysis of Convex Relaxations for MAP Estimation', in NIPS 21, Neural Information Processing Conference, and (oral) Best Paper at Conference for 'O. Woodford, P.H.S. Torr, I. Reid, and A.W. Fitzgibbon, Global Stereo Reconstruction under Second Order Smoothness Priors', in Proceedings IEEE Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2008 . More recently he has been awarded best science paper at BMVC 2010 and ECCV 2010.

He was involved in the algorithm design for Boujou released by 2D3. Boujou has won a clutch of industry awards, including Computer Graphics World Innovation Award, IABM Peter Wayne Award, and CATS Award for Innovation, and a technical EMMY. He then worked closely with this Oxford based company as well as other companies such as Sony on the Wonderbook project.

He is a director of new Oxford based spin out OxSight, and Chief Scientific Advisor for Five AI.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2019, and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2021 for contributions to computer vision. In 2021 he was made Turing AI world leading researcher fellow.