Biography

I attended the Australian Maritime College in Launceston Tasmania for two years commencing in 1987. In 1988 I received an Associate Diploma in Marine Radiocommunications. During 1989 and 1990 I worked for Australian Offshore Services (a branch of P&O Australia) as Radio officer on various oil exploration vessels in Bass strait and The Timor sea. In 1990 I moved to P&O Polar to work as Deck Communication Officer on the Antarctic research and supply icebreaker Aurora Australis. The Aurora Australis is chartered by The Australian Antarctic Division to carry cargo and people to Australia's three Antarctic stations, Mawson, Davis and Casey, and also the base on Macquarie Island. In addition to this the Aurora Australis also conducts oceanography and marine science cruises. I worked on the Aurora Australis from 1990 to 1998.

Whilst on leave from the Aurora Australis I continued my education first, at Murdoch University in 1994 then at The University of Western Australia commencing in 1996. In November 2000 I completed a Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical sciences (Hons) majoring in Computer Science, Information Technology Applications, and Linguistics at The School of Computer Science and Software Engineering. I also completed a Diploma of Modern Languages in Japanese, concurrently with my degree course. During the summer of 2000/2001 I worked as an intern at Syrinx Speech Systems in Sydney, developing a dialogue flow control system using VoiceXML. My honours year research was in the area of lip tracking and visual speech recognition under the supervision of Dr EunJong Holden. My honour's thesis was entitled "2D template matching snakes for lip contour tracking".

In March 2001 I moved to Martigny, in the French speaking region of Switzerland to commence a PhD at the IDIAP Research Institute. The research for my PhD was primarily in the field of human action recognition in videos specifically, sports broadcast and smart meeting room data. This research was conducted under the supervision of Dr Samy Bengio and Dr Jean-Marc Odobez. I received my PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in October 2005, my thesis was entitled "Multimedia Event Modelling and Recognition".

In February 2006 I joined the Machine Vision Group (MVG) at The University of Oulu as a post-doctoral researcher. My research at the MVG focused on human activity recognition and body part segmentation in surveillance videos. I also collaborated this colleagues on visual motion estimation in mobile phones and visual speech recognition. In January 2009 I joined the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at The University Surrey in Guildford in the United Kingdom.