Dr William Smith

University of York

William Smith is a Reader in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition research group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. He is currently a Royal Academy of Engineering/The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow and an Associate Editor of the journal Pattern Recognition.

His research interests span vision, graphics and ML. Specifically, physics-based and 3D computer vision, shape and appearance modelling and the application of statistics and machine learning to these areas. The application areas in which he most commonly works are face/body analysis and synthesis, surveying and mapping, object capture and inverse rendering. A wide variety of tools and areas of maths are often useful in his research such as: convex optimisation, nonlinear optimisation, manifold learning, learning/optimisation on manifolds, computational geometry and low level computer vision (e.g. features and correspondence). He  leads a team of five PhD students and one postdoc and has published over 100 papers, many in the top conferences and journals in the field.

He was General Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production in 2019 and is Program Chair for the British Machine Vision Conference in 2020.

Research themes:

• Game AI

• Game Design

• Computational Creativity

• Graphics and rendering

• Content creation