Dr Jonathon Hare

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Projects

LivingKnowledge

Project Homepage • ECS Project Page • Code

LivingKnowledge is a large European funded project investigating bias and diversity of web documents. The overall goal of the LivingKnowledge project is to bring a new quality into search and knowledge management technology, which makes search results more concise, complete and contextualised. Southampton's involvement is mostly related to the multimedia aspects of the data. In particular, within the project I am investigating; techniques for extracting facts and opinions from images, semantic image search engines (both the back-end and user interface) that support result diversification, and techniques image matching/content-based retrieval on web-scale corpora.

LiveMemories

Project Homepage • ECS Project Page • Code

The LiveMemories project is funded by the Provincia Autonoma di Trento (The Autonomous Province of Trento), Italy. The aim of the project is to scale up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources, setting the scene for a Content Management Platform for Trentino; using this information to support new ways of linking, summarising and classifying data in a new generation of digital memories which are `alive’ and user-centered; and to turn the creation of such memories into a communal web activity. My research in the project is focus on techniques for automatically generating useful information from images content (i.e. automatic annotation). In particular we are interested in exploring if it is possible to estimate the place a picture was taken by matching against a large corpus of geotagged images in the Trentino region.

LifeGuide

Project Homepage • ECS Project Page • Code

LifeGuide is an interdisciplinary project between the ECS and the Schools of Psychology at UCL and Southampton. The aim is to investigate whether it is possible to develop a software system that allows health professionals to easily author interactive websites (known as "behavioural interventions") that can help influence people's behaviour. For example, one possible intervention may aim to help it's users give up smoking, or reduce alcohol consumption. The project has many challenges; not least of which are all the HCI and usability considerations in designing software that allows novices to perform what can be a rather complex task. During my time on the project, I designed the overall architecture, wrote a large portion of the back-end software (based on JQTI, developed in the AsDel project described below), and managed the day-to-day finances and running of the project team in ECS.

AsDel

Project Homepage • ECS Project Page • Code • QTIEngine

The AsDel project was funded by JISC to develop an assessment delivery engine based on the IMS QTI V2.1 specification. My role on the project was to design the overall architecture and manage the programmer employed on the project (whilst doing some of the coding myself and doing independent image retrieval research!). One particular element of the project was the development of a software library for processing QTI XML documents, called JQTI. JQTI seems to have become rather popular in the QTI community and has seen significant uptake in other projects. As part of a piece of recent consultancy work, I was employed to update the JQTI library to cover the entirety of the QTI specification (rather than just the assessment parts). I also developed a new web-based system, QTIEngine for running QTI questions and assessments that removed reference to much of the legacy code used in the AsDel project for handling presentation of questions. This engine also contained a plugin for handling questions with advanced mathematical content.

Semantic Gap

Project Homepage • Semantic Space Introduction • Semantic Space Code

The semantic gap project aimed to explore the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval. In essence, the project had two parts; in the first part our collaborators surveyed and collected data about queries from a number of professional image archives. This data was then analysed in order to give us some insight into what professional image searchers actually want. The second phase of the project was more technological and involved the development of techniques for actually helping the searchers. In particular, we looked at ways of making large unannotated image collections accessible to retrieval through augmented browsing and semantic search (based on improvements in the semantic space developed in my PhD). We also developed techniques based on semantic-web technologies that used inferencing for automatic query expansion.

PhD

Thesis • Semantic Space Introduction • Semantic Space Code

My PhD research covered a number of areas based around image retrieval. I began by investigating the use of interest points and salient regions for robust content-based retrieval and matching. The latter parts of my research increasing focused on the problem of the semantic gap in image retrieval, and I began to investigate and develop novel methodologies for providing semantic search of unannotated imagery. In particular, I developed a linear-algebraic semantic space representation in which words and images were projected into a large vector space such that images were placed near to the words that semantically described their content. The best part of this representation is that it allows unannotated images to be projected in, and by analysing their placement it is possible to determine the words that are most likely associated with the respective images.

Other

iGesture

Project Homepage - Information & Software Download

During the course of my PhD in association with Maria Karam, I created iGesture, a simple desktop gesture recognition system. The software was capable of (badly!) tracking coloured markers and assigning different commands to various gestures performed by a human holding the markers.