Curriculum Vitae for Dr. Sina Samangooei

ss@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Personal Details

Research

Interests

The development and application of novel approaches in Machine Learning and Computer Vision to address the exploration and effective utilisation of Large Scale Multimedia Corpa by humans, including: Multimedia retrieval through semantic and content based queries; Automatic annotation of multimedia artifacts towards machine understanding of scenes and objects; Human and Object recognition for applications in pervasive computing and surveillance.

Achievements

• Semantic Biometrics dataset - Constructions of a unique semantically enriched biometrics dataset along with baseline algorithms for semantic biometric retrieval and identification
• Open Source multimedia library - Primary developer on an open source mulimedia processing toolkit (openimaj.org) and a content based image indexing framework (imageterrier.org) implementing several state of the art techniques in computer vision and machine learning research

Education

• PhD in Computer Science
  University of Southampton 2006 - 2010

  • Title: Semantic Biometrics
  • Supervisor: Prof. M. S. Nixon
  • Explored the ability of human understandable semantic descriptions towards improved identification and retrieval of individuals in biometrics enabled surveillance applications
  • Designed a system for efficient gathering and storage of semantic human descriptions against arbitrary biometric sources, integrating the system with Southampton Biometric Tunnel project while aiding in its development
  • Designed algorithms for effective fusion of semantic terms with automatic visual components, displaying improved recognition of individuals when human semantic descriptions are considered
  • Developed the first algorithms for the automatic semantic annotation of biometric data sources, demonstrating the ability of such approaches when applied to both existing and novel gait biometric datasets.

• MEng Computer Science, First Class
  University of Southampton 2002 - 2006

  Dissertation é

  Content Based Image Comparison and Retrieval using Sketch Analysis. An end to end multimedia search system for retrieving images using a quick sketch as the query.

  Selected undergraduate modules/achievements:

  • Group design project - Obstruction management tool for Southampton Airport
  • Individual Research project - A review of automatic and assisted annotation techniques in multimedia
  • Operating Systems - developed a 32-Bit Real-time Operating System using C
  • Communications and Networks - developed a HTTP web-server using Java
  • Interactive Entertainment Systems - developed a fully playable game using C++/OpenGL

• A levels
  Greenshaw High School 2000 - 2002

  A level Maths (A), Physics (A), ICT (A). AS level Economics (B)

Professional Experience

• Research Fellow
  University of Southampton 2010 - present

  • Investigating scalable solutions for large-scale multimedia retrieval tasks
  • Exploring robust techniques for automatic multimedia understanding
  • Developing an open source multimedia analysis toolkit (openimaj.org) and image indexing framework (imageterrier.org)

• Research Assistant
  University of Southampton 2009 - 2010

  • Web developer on the Lifeguide research project
  • Assisted in the construction of community features of the lifeguideonline.org website
  • Developed several key components of jQTI, a Java implementation of the QTI question/answer specification

• Technical Research Staff
  University of Southampton Summer 2005

  • Performed initial research on the EU funded eChase project
  • Created the first prototype of the Mediaengine portion of the eChase system
  • Wrote Java interface with backing C++ FVS content based image comparison algorithms
  • Wrote web service interface allowing FVS algorithm traversal of large image collections and comparisons of collections with provided inputs

• Technical Staff
  IT-Innovation Summer 2004

  • Joined final portions of the EU funded Sculpteur project
  • Improved the JSP Based interface
  • Created multiple front ends in CSS for the system to match designs used by project partners (e.g. V&A Museum)

Skills

• Technical

  • Highly skilled programmer. Experience in Java (and other JVM lanauges including Groovy), Python and C++ along with experience in Matlab, Ruby, Prolog and Scheme
  • Experienced database administrator, highly skilled in SQL with some experience with ORM database models (e.g. SQLAlchemy)
  • Experienced web programmer. Confident in both server side programming (Grails, PHP, JSP and Pylons) as well as client side scripting (javascript+jQuery, HTML and CSS)
  • Confident unix administrator. Experience using shell tools to maintain research and production systems
  • Extensive experience with MS Windows (all versions), Mac OS (Tiger and Leopard) and many Linux environments

• Positions of Responsibility

  • President of the Southampton University Circus Society, 2005
  • Co-organiser of the ISIS Postgraduate Conference 2008

Teaching Experience

Given guest lectures to 3rd year undergraduate students on the “Multimedia systems” course in 2009 and 2010.

Some involvement in supervision of 3rd year undergraduate individual research projects (IRP).

Teaching and Marking (since 2007) in 1st year computer science courses including Data Structures and Algorithms.

Attended Teaching for Research Staff introductory course (2011)

Publications

In Progress

Hare, J., Samangooei, S., Dupplaw, D., Lewis, P. ImageTerrier: A platform for scalable high-performance image retrieval. (in progress)

Samangooei, S., Hare, J., Lewis, P. Massively Parallel Image Retrieval using Hadoop. (in progress)

Accepted

Hare, J., Samangooei, S. and Dupplaw, D. (2011) OpenIMAJ and ImageTerrier: Java Libraries and Tools for Scalable Multimedia Analysis and Indexing of Images. In: ACM Multimedia 2011, 28/11/2011 until 1/12/2011, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. pp. 691-694.

Hare, J., Samangooei, S. and Lewis, P. (2011) Efficient clustering and quantisation of SIFT features: Exploiting characteristics of the SIFT descriptor and interest region detectors under image inversion. In: The ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2011), 17-20 April 2011, Trento, Italy.

Samangooei, S., Bustard, J., Seely, R., Nixon, M. and Carter, J. (2011) On Acquisition and Analysis of a Dataset Comprising of Gait, Ear and Semantic data. In: Multibiometrics for Human Identification, pp. 277-301, CUP. ISBN 9780521115964

Samangooei, S. and Nixon, M. (2010) Performing content-based retrieval of humans using gait biometrics. Multimed Tools Applications, 49 (1). pp. 195-212.

Williams, S., Yardley, L., Wills, G., Samangooei, S. and Gilbert, L. (2010) A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to Support Sharing and Collaboration in Internet Intervention Projects. In: Med-e-Tel 2010, 14-16 April 2010,, Luxembourg. pp. 518-522.

Hare, J., Samangooei, S., Lewis, P. and Nixon, M. (2008) Semantic spaces revisited: investigating the performance of auto-annotation and semantic retrieval using semantic spaces. In: CIVR '08: The 2008 international conference on Content-based image and video retrieval, July 7-9 2008, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. pp. 359-368.

Samangooei, S. and Nixon, M. (2008) Performing Content-based Retrieval of Humans using Gait Biometrics. In: SAMT 2008, 2/12/2008, Koblenz. pp. 105-120.

Samangooei, S., Nixon, M. and Guo, B. (2008) The Use of Semantic Human Description as a Soft Biometric. In: Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems, Sept. 29-Oct.1, 2008, Washington, USA.

Seely, R. D., Samangooei, S., Middleton, L., Carter, J. and Nixon, M. (2008) The University of Southampton Multi-Biometric Tunnel and introducing a novel 3D gait dataset. In: Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, 29th September 2008, Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Washington DC, USA.

Referees

• Professor Mark S. Nixon

  Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ Phone: +44 (0)23 8059 3542 • E-Mail: msn@ecs.soton.ac.uk

• Professor Paul Lewis

  Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ Phone: +44 (0)23 8059 3715 • E-Mail: phl@ecs.soton.ac.uk

• Dr Gary Wills

  Learning Societies Lab, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ Phone: +44 (0)23 8059 2831 • E-Mail: gbw@ecs.soton.ac.uk