DoC student wins the Qualcomm Cambridge Innovation Fellowship 2015

James Booth a PhD student here in the Department of Computing has been selected as as the winner of the Qualcomm Cambridge Innovation Fellowship 2015.

Qualcomm Technologies have announced this years winners of the Qualcomm InnovationFellowship (QInF) program. QInF is an annual program that focuses on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring the most innovative PhD students across Europe and the United States.

James Booth a PhD student from the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBug) here in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, and two students (Yarin Gal and Mark van der Wilk)  from  Cambridge University were selected as the winning students for their outstanding proposals. Each fellowship includes an award of £10,000 and the winning students receive mentoring from Qualcomm researchers.

James is supervised by Dr Stefanos Zafeiriou, and was selected for his proposal “Automatic construction of massive-scale 3D Morphable Models”. He is investigating an approach to building large-scale dense 3D models that can describe the shape and variation of faces over the whole human race with unprecedented accuracy and detail, and is fully automated and highly robust. This will be a significant leap forward towards the ultimate goal of statistical models that will be capable of synthesising the detailed surface of any human face.

In addition to being awarded the Fellowship James was also announced by Qualcomm as the overall Europe Champion, for having the most innovative proposal from the United Kingdom and Austria QInF programs.

Charles Bergan, Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm Research stated that,  “It was difficult to choose from such an impressive group of students, but we felt that James Booth, Yarin Gal, and Mark van der Wilk had the most innovative proposals. We are very excited to welcome them to the program and for the chance to work with them to jointly cultivate forward thinking research.”

Well done James!