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Applications of Artificial Intelligence
In January 2023, I joined the University of Hull as a lecturer (assistant professor) at the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Modelling. Influenced by this intellectual environment, I began to work in applied artificial intelligence in parallel to systems research.
Real-Time 3D Reconstruction from 2D Human Images
I am the secondary supervisor of Gulraiz Khan, a PhD candidate. Professor Kevin Pimbblet is his primary supervisor.
In the first part of his project, he developed a deep learning framework to predict facial landmarks, age, and gender from human face images. The framework employs ResNet-18 as a backbone model for feature extraction. The extracted convolutional feature maps are shared across three lightweight neural network branches. These branches predict facial landmarks, age, and gender respectively.
In the second part, He built a modular deep learning framework for real-time, identity-aware, and clothing-aware 3D reconstruction. It generates two separate 3D models representing the face and body of an imaged individual. The embedding of the facial image is integrated with the predicted facial landmarks, age, and gender prior to decoding. He is currently developing a stitching module to merge face models with their corresponding body models.
MSc Projects
Our MSc degree programme in artificial intelligence and data science includes a dissertation project. Throughout the academic year, I propose and/or supervise these projects. Sometimes, our students design their own projects. Sometimes, we collaborate with external partners.
My students and I have developed applications of artificial intelligence in areas such as medical image classification, patient record classification, dysarthric speech recognition, sport science, game development, fintech, optical character recognition, image captioning, multimodal sentiment analysis, retrieval-augmented generation, and optimisation.
In the summer trimester of 2023, I supervised 14 projects, including collaborative projects with the Academic Vascular Surgical Unit (AVSU) of Hull Royal Infirmary, a tertiary teaching hospital run by an NHS hospital trust. Enoch Appiah built an image processing pipeline and a CNN-LSTM model to digitise handwritten clinical notes. He won the Best MSc Research Project Prize. Folakemi Fatiregun built an AI system to allocate hospital beds. Partly on the strength of her impressive dissertation, she secured a full-time position as an information analyst at the same NHS trust.
In the autumn trimester of 2023, I supervised 12 projects. Mustabshira Zia built an automatic speech recognition system for dysarthric people. Esther Chukwuezi experimented with diverse dimensionality reduction techniques to optimise risk prediction based on cardiopulmonary exercise testing data about people with heart failure.
In the summer trimester of 2024, I supervised three projects, including two collaborative projects with Spencer Group, a civil engineering company in Hull. Within the framework of retrieval-augmented generation, Duy Thanh Do used the company's database of emails and documents to optimise the outputs of large language models, giving them the ability to produce summaries of project milestones. Working with the same database, Olalekan Akindele used knowledge graphs to enhance retrieval-augmented generation, turning large language models into chatbots. Olalekan won the Best MSc Research Project Prize.
In the autumn trimester of 2024, I supervised two projects. Kevin Nwankwo built a generative adversarial network to design football players for the football management simulation video game Football Manager 2023.