Computing leader joins Adelaide

Professor of computer science, Ian Reid, will join the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies within the school of computer science at the University of Adelaide. Reid has come from the University of Oxford where he led the Active Vision Laboratory, with research in computer vision and robot vision. He went to Oxford as the Western Australian Rhodes Scholar in 1988, completing his DPhil in 1991 and winning a variety of postdoctoral research grants and fellowships, and then a lectureship in 2000. “The aim of computer vision is to understand the content of an image or video, to a variety of ends – trying to make computers see,” Reid said. His work received national UK attention in the mid-1990s. He and his team were the first to create real-time 3D maps from video and pinpointing the position of the camera within the environment so that live video can be combined with graphics realistically, or used for robotic navigation. This has become known as visual SLAM (simultaneous localisations and mapping).