Andrew Fitzgibbon

You often hear people being introduced on TV with the phrase that they “need no introduction” — and this is one of the few cases in the vision research community where this is genuinely the case.

Our Distinguished Fellow for 2017 studied first at University College Cork, then moved to Edinburgh where he contributed to, among other things, HIPR, the first web-based vision teaching aid. He then received a Royal Society Research Fellowship which took him to Oxford, where he most notably contributed to the Boujou system, which won an Emmy award. If you have seen a recent movie that has real actors and CGI, you have probably seen the fruits of this work.

In 2005, our Distinguished Fellow moved to Microsoft Research, where he was a major contributor to the development of the Kinect, which quickly became an important vision capture device. He has recently been working on the Hololens, which shows every sign as being as ground-breaking and important. However, our Distinguished Fellow has not worked purely on development: he has amassed at least ten best paper awards at major conferences, and also the silver medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the BCS Roger Needham award. He is a past chair of the BMVA Executive Committee, and it was at his instigation that BMVC grew from a good national conference into the important international one that it is today. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the British Computer Society and of the International Association for Pattern Recognition.

Our BMVA Distinguished Fellow for 2017 is Andrew Fitzgibbon.