Chris Town

Dr Chris Town

MA PhD

Chris carries out research and teaching at the Department of Computer Science & Technology in the field of Computer Vision.

Chris Town

Chris is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at Wolfson. He is also a Tutor and co-ordinates our postgraduate mentoring scheme which provides Wolfson PhD students with informal expert support from Wolfson’s Fellows, CRAs and Senior Members in a closely related area of study.

Chris is an Affiliated Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory). He primarily teaches Computer Vision and related courses to undergraduates and MPhil students and has supervised over 50 final year undergraduate, Masters, and Diploma students for their projects and dissertations, as well as co-supervising PhD students. Furthermore, he is Chief Technology Officer of Imense Ltd, a high-tech company co-founded by him that develops novel image analysis, optical character recognition and document verification solutions.

Chris’s research lies at the nexus of computer vision, information retrieval, machine learning, and language processing. Together with Dr David Sinclair he pioneered the ontology based approach to automated visual information processing. His PhD work (supervised by Professor John Daugman OBE) and post-doctoral research in this area at Cambridge were honoured in the UK's distinguished dissertation competition, and led to the award of a Trinity College Rouse Ball Scholarship, an Industrial Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and a JRF at Wolfson College. He previously worked at AT&T Labs Research, where he reported directly to Dr David Belanger (AT&T Chief Scientist) and worked with Dr Yann LeCun (the pioneer of deep convolutional neural networks).

At Wolfson he serves on the Educational Policy and IT Strategy Committees, as well as the Strategic Planning Workgroup. Chris was previously elected as a member of the College Council and as an Inspector-of-Accounts for the Governing Body.