Appointments

Professor Vicki Hanson
Leverhulme Visiting Professor
School of Computing
Vicki Hanson, one of the world's leading researchers on computing technologies for older and disabled people, has joined the School of Computing as Leverhulme Visiting Professor.

Professor Hanson's background is in Cognitive Psychology. She has been particularly interested in exploring how deaf children learn to read and become proficient in their native sign language. She has conducted research on American Sign Language (ASL), looking at how early exposure to ASL fosters improved reading skill, and building computer-based training systems that allow English and ASL to be used together to promote reading success.

More recently, she has been looking at issues of universal access to the World Wide Web, in particular looking at how the Web can be made more usable for older adults and others with visual, motor, and cognitive disabilities.

Professor Hanson is Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, an international organization of professionals working on research and development of computing and information technology to help people with disabilities.

She is also manager of Accessibility Research at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York.

"I have been working for more than 30 years on ways to improve the lives of people with disabilities through the use of computer technology," said Professor Hanson. "Among research centres in this area, the School of Computing at the University of Dundee stands out as a world leader."

"Researchers in Dundee have been instrumental in defining this field of study and have created novel research methods and new technologies to assist older adults and numerous people with disabilities. As such, the chance to work with this group is an extraordinary opportunity for me."

Professor Emanuele Trucco
Northern Research Partnership Chair of Computational Vision
School of Computing
Professor Trucco has carried out theoretical and applied research in computer vision and image processing at various institutions since 1984, including the University of Edinburgh, Heriot Watt University and the Joint Research Centre of the European Union.

His research portfolio spans immersive communications, medical image analysis and automation. Current projects include aiming to animate a human character using only video material, identifying signs of various pathologies in retinal imagery and assessing work progress on construction sites using static cameras and learning techniques.

He has attracted more than £1.5 million in funding from the European Union, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and independent institutions including the Royal Society.

Professor Trucco has published more than 150 refereed papers on computer vision and applications as well as two books, one of which (with Alessandro Verri of the University of Genoa) has become an international standard.

He serves regularly on the scientific committees of all the major conferences in his field and is the associate editor for two international journals. He is also a former Editor-in-Chief for the Institution of Electrical Engineers Proceedings on Vision, Signal and Speech Processing.

Professor Trucco is currently the Deputy Director of the Joint Research Institute (JRI) on Computational Systems within the Northern Research Partnership, one of the three engineering research pooling partnerships in Scotland, including the Universities of Dundee and Aberdeen, and Robert Gordon University.

Until last May he was on the board of the JRI on Signal and Image Processing of the Edinburgh Research Partnership, comprising the University of Edinburgh and Heriot Watt.