Biography

Edwin Hancock graduated with a BSc degree in physics in 1977, a PhD
degree in high energy nuclear physics in 1981 and a D.Sc. by
publication in 2008 from Durham University. He is Emeritus Professor
of Computer Vision in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of York, Adjunct Professor and Principal Investigator
of the Beijing Innovation Centre for Big Data and Brain Computing at
Beihang University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Xiamen University, and Shanghai Science and Technology Commission Overseas Visiting Fellow at Shanghai University. He commenced his research career in the field of
high energy nuclear physics, working on bubble chamber experiments
performed at CERN and SLAC between 1977 and 1984. In 1985 he changed
fields to work in computer science, and currently undertakes research
in the use of graph-based methods in computer vision, pattern
recognition and complex networks. He focuses on how pattern
recognition and machine learning can be performed using data in the
form of graphs, trees and strings. He is best known for his work on
graph matching and spectral graph theory. He also works on physics
based vision, where he has focused on how to recover surface shape and
surface sub-structure from information conveyed by the scattering of
light and from polarisation measurements.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021, and was named
a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) in 2016, Fellow of the International
Association for Pattern Recognition in 2000. and Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association Fellow in 2022. He was awarded an
honorary doctorate by the University of Alicante in 2015. In 2016 he
was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pattern Recognition.
Between 2009 and 2014, he held a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit
Award. In 1991 he was awarded the Seventeenth Annual Pattern
Recognition Award for his paper titled "Discrete Relaxation",
co-authored with Josef Kittler and published in the journal Pattern
Recognition. The British Machine Vision Association awarded him its
Distinguished Fellowship for 2016. In 2018 he received the Pierre
Devijver Award from the International Association for Pattern
Recognition. He was second vice-president of the International
Association for Pattern Recognition (2016-2018) and IAPR Governing
Board Member (2006-2016). He is an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor for the period 2021-2023.