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Tony Cohn
University of Leeds
Membership Number: 28
Address: School of Computing, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
Email: agc@comp.leeds.ac.uk
Phone: +44 113 34 35482
Fax: +44 113 34 35468
URL: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/agc/agc.html

Biographical Sketch
Tony Cohn (1954) is Professor of Automated Reasoning and Head of the School of Computing at the University of Leeds. He graduated from the University of Essex with a BSc in Computing and a PhD in Computer Science. He spent 10 years as a lecturer at he University of Warwick before moving to Leeds in 1990. He was appointed as a Full Professor at the University of Leeds in 1996.

His major research interest is in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and is currently President of KR Inc., the body responsible for the international KR conferences, and Conference Chair for IJCAI’03, the major international AI conference. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has focussed his research on qualitative spatial and spatio-temporal reasoning which has a variety of potential applications, including high level interpretation visual data.

Leeds University (School of Computing)
The School of Computing at Leeds University is one of the largest research-based computer science departments in the UK. Within the School, the Computer Vision and Knowledge Representation groups have been in existence for over 10 years and now have a total of nine permanent members of academic staff.

The Computer Vision group has pioneered the development and application of spatio-temporal dynamical models for the analysis of images depicting non-rigid objects such as people and animals. Early work on tracking has developed into a broader interest in behaviour, with application to surveillance, animal husbandry, and human-computer interaction. A key feature of this work is the acquisition of object and event models from video corpora using statistical learning procedures. The overall approach is aimed at producing systems that are robust, scaleable and autonomous - essential requirements in most applications. This work is funded by grants from the EU, UK research councils and industry.

The Knowledge Representation group has developed a variety of calculi for handling qualitative spatial information, including the well known RCC mereotopological language and calculi for handling orientation information and for dealing with vagueness, uncertainty and granularity changes. The group is concerned not only with underlying ontological issues, but also with developing both theoretically complete calculi but also decidable and tractable subsets for efficient reasoning. The group has collaborated with the Computer Vision group in applying qualitative spatial calculi to video interpretation.


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