Bio:

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 is 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 UK founding the vision side of the Machine learning and perception group. He is now 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.

Philip Torr 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 he together with member of his group have won several other awards including most recently 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,  2007, 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.

Recent SIGGRAPH on VideoTrace work with the University of Adelaide has been featured extensively on the internet including slashdot.

He was involved in the algorithm design for Boujou (for which he receives royalties, along with Paul Beardsley, Andrew Fitzgibbon and Andrew Zisserman) 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, here is a picture of the EMMY. He continues to work closely with this Oxford based company as well as other companies such as Sony and Sharp.

Boujou is already in use in many of the premier film and video post-production “houses” in London and Hollywood, several of which have multiple licenses. Because of Boujou’s fully automatic mode of operation, a new practice is being introduced by which every “shot” which might be modified by a visual effect is tracked, whether or not it is finally used in the production. Boujou tracking credits have come thick and fast and include; Harry Potter, Tomb Raider, Enemy at the Gates, When Dinosaurs Ruled America, Mike Bassett England Manager, and BSkyB Premiership Football commercial.

Current commercial work involves some new Vicon technology about to be released and some work that has found its way into a new Sony PS3 game.

He is on the editorial board of

ACM Computers and Entertainment (sharing this honour with Roy E Disney!),

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE PAMI); Ranked #5 among 205 computer science titles in the latest Journal Citation Reports!

     Journal of Image and Vision Computing.