{ Stuart James }

Samuel Waugh's N8 CIR Summer Internship leads to Development of new AI Tool for Art Contextualisation

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This summer, Durham University Computer Science student Samuel Waugh completed a research internship with the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) under my supervision. Over the course of the project, Samuel designed and developed ArteFact, an innovative web-based tool that helps art historians and cultural researchers uncover meaningful connections between paintings and scholarly writing.

Welcome Professor Alessio Del Bue to Durham — Strengthening Our Collaboration

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

We are delighted to welcome Professor Alessio Del Bue to Durham University in his newly conferred role as Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His appointment marks an exciting new chapter in our long-standing and evolving collaboration.

Professor Del Bue, a Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, brings to Durham a wealth of expertise in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and multimodal data analysis.

New position at Durham University

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0100

As of 1st September 2023, I will be taking up a position as Assistant Professor in Visual Computing at Durham University working in the VIViD group. This marks a major transition for me, as I move from being a contract-based Assistant Professor (or Researcher RTDa in the Italian system) to a permanent member of staff (i.e. Lecturer).

Two New EU Projects kicking off 2023: DCitizens & BoSS

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year we see the kick-off of two new projects Bauhaus of the Seas (BOSS) and DCitizens. Two projects focused on citizens and communities with very exciting prospects. Check them out!

Three great videos about the pilot locations of MEMEX

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We recently published three videos on the pilot locations, Paris, Barcelona and Spain, of the MEMEX Project. This challenging collaboration effort came together during the second wave of COVID so a massive effort was needed by the Michael Culture Association, NOHO Limited, Fundacio Interarts per a la Cooperacio Cultural Internacional (InterArts), Mapas das Ideias and Dédale.

Two positions on MEMEX Project (Post Doc and Engineer)

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

We have two (exciting) positions to join us on the MEMEX EU Project! One engineer to coordinate with the project consortium to develop an innovative app exposing Cultural Heritage and project participant stories. The second is a post-doc to research and develop algorithms for 3D Scene Understanding! These are two very exciting positions to work with us and create impactful tools and research.

About the project…

The MEMEX project promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related tools that provide inclusive access to tangible and intangible cultural heritage and, at the same time, facilitate encounters, discussions and interactions between communities at risk of social exclusion. These tools will empower communities of people with the possibility of welding together their fragmented experiences and memories into compelling and geolocalised storylines using new personalised digital content linked to the pre-existent European Cultural Heritage (CH). The tools of MEMEX will allow the communities to tell their stories and to claim their rights and equal participation in the European society. To this end, MEMEX will nurture actions that contribute to, rather than undermine, practices of recognition of differences by giving voice to individuals for promoting cultural diversity.

Project Site: https://memexproject.eu/

New PhD Position Available in Visual Reasoning!

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Exciting news, for me and possibly for you! This post marks my first PhD call where I will be leading the research direction of the successful candidate in collaboration with Alessio Del Bue (IIT) and Sebastiano Vascon (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). So, we are looking for someone with interest in pursuing a PhD in Visual Reasoning to join the Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision Department of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). The University of Genova are the awarding body of this PhD, so please be careful of the details which can be found on the University of Genova website.

And it begins... MEMEX

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today we had our Kick-off Meeting for the MEMEX EU Project here is the abstract:

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.

More information coming soon at www.memexproject.eu or on EU Cordis https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/870743

Review in a week*

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

For a long time now, I have been reviewing articles at a variety of journals and conferences, which is “usually” tracked within publons. While I try hard to make sure that I get reviews completed before the deadline often, when it comes to Journals, this is accomplished in the final few days before the deadline. This creates a significant stress and anxiety to my academic life, as I’m constantly worrying about the tasks that I have to do, and in some cases staying up late to get the review completed. Therefore, as I review my activities, I consider how I can improve the way I review, and therefore I propose (not originally) review in a week*.

Organising VisArt @ ECCV'18!

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0100

This year I’m very excited to be organising the workshop VISART IV with several other great chairs:

Alessio Del Bue, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT);
Leonardo Impett, EPFL & Biblioteca Hertziana, Max Planck for Art History;
Peter Hall, University of Bath;
Joao Paulo Costeira, ISR, Instituto Superior Técnico;
Peter Bell, Friedrichs-Alexander University Nüremberg.

We hope that this year pushes harder the collaboration between Computer Vision, Digital Humanities and Art History. With aims to generate some fantastic new partnerships to be published at this workshop and future ones.