John Bustard Email & Phone Number

Belfast, Gb

Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

In September 2017 I established the Qlab makerspace and IOT lab within the school of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Since this time, equipping and running these spaces and the activities they support has been my primary educational focus outside of formal teaching duties. Since 2018, these labs have grown to include a VR lab and Lego lab managed by other academics with myself as director.Initially, Qlab provided a space for students’ personal projects and our first members were capable self taught students in Computer Science, SESE and EEE programs. It has since grown to have impact in many areas of the school and university. Qlab activities include: Running hackathons, particularly our annual 5 day 'development week' hackathonStartup-style 10 week summer internships working on projects including those for local entrepreneursExtracurricular tutoring of students in advanced topics such as Deep LearningSupport for final year projects requiring specialised equipment, such as GPU based machines for deep learning, electronics or light manufacturingSupport for PhD and research staff wanting to prototype new tools/productsIn 2020 I established a new "Computer Science Challenges" module to provide experiences similar to our summer internships as part of our computing degree programs. The module gets capable first year students to develop advanced masters level final year projects. They are given intensive personal coaching and no formal teaching, lectures or labs. Students are taught to teach themselves what they need to complete the projects and to redesign the project objectives to ensure they produce useful work for others within the 10 working weeks of the module. This module is currently the most successful and rewarding teaching experience I have ever been a part of.

I initially joined Queen's as a member of both the Speech, Image and Vision Systems and the Secure Digital Systems research groups. I am now a member of the Intelligent Advanced Manufacturing research group. My focus is on the application of machine learning and computer vision technology to security and manufacturing applications and the teaching of advanced technology projects and entrepreneurship. I also have a broader interest in the application of 3D modelling and statistical analysis of the human body which includes applications in medical technology. I also have an interest in personal manufacturing including 3D printing and other new democratised manufacturing technologies.

Chairman of the ethical advisory board for the ISAR+ European project (http://isar.i112.eu/). My responsibilities include coordinating and reviewing key deliverables on the project to identify any potential ethical issues.

Working on an eu project to investigate how biometrics can be spoofed and what countermeasures can be used to protect against those attacks.www.tabularasa-euproject.orgMy focus is on gait recognition, which involves 3D reconstruction from video, body modelling, markerless motion capture and machine learning.

PhD in Computer Vision, focusing on face and ear modelling for recognition.

Since July 2005 I have been working in the New Concepts department of Sony Cambridge developing and presenting game pitches for PS3 and PSP.

Phd, Computer Vision

Ma, Computer Science