Dr Anastasia Angelopoulou

Anastassia Angelopoulou's profile photo

Senior Lecturer

Computer Science and Engineering

(United Kingdom) +44 20 7911 5000 ext 64508
115 New Cavendish Street
London
GB
W1W 6UW
Thursday 12:00 - 14:00
I'm part of

About me

I am a Senior Lecturer (equiv. to Associate Professor) of Mathematics and Computer Graphics at the Dept. of Computer Science, Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Westminster, UK, since 2005, and a researcher at the Cognitive Computing Research Lab, University of Westminster.

I am also a Fellow of UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a certified STEM Ambassador.

I have more than 5 years industry experience in UK and Greece, and I have worked as image processing assistant and software developer in companies such as Incredible Networks Ltd., FLAG Atlantic UK Limited, and ALPHABET ABEE.

My research interests are in the areas of Computer Vision and Machine Learning with emphasis on tracking/recognising gestures in sign languages, human emotions and its applications in Affective Computing and Social Robotics. More specifically, in Brain-Computer Interaction using physiological signal analysis for emotion assessment (e.g. EEG) and in the analysis and recognition of facial and body gestures and emotions in adults and children using biosensors such as GSR.

Awards, Grants and markers of esteem

2018: awarded research grant from the Dunhill Medical Trust together with colleagues from the Cognitive Computing Research Lab (UoW) and the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) at UCL.

2018: GPU Small Grant from NVIDIA. We have been donated (1) Titan V to support our research on hand gesture/face depth map from a monocular image or video without apriori depth information.

2018: Lead editor for the Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience journal special issue on "Brain Inspired Intelligent Systems for Daily Assistance", Hindawi, December 2018.  

2017: (with 3 colleagues from the Dept. of Computer Science) "Westminster Teaching Excellence Team Award 2017" for contributions to the Mathematics provision. 

2017: evaluation panellist for the 2016 call - Lifelong Learning for Intelligent Systems by CHIST-ERA (a consortium of funding organisations in Europe with programmes supporting research in ICT) as rapporteur for 1 proposal relevant to brain-computer interfaces and co-rapporteur for 3 others in relation to autonomous vehicles.

2016:Elsevier Outstanding Review Status, Applied Soft Computing Journal in recognition of contributions to the quality of the journal over the last 10 years. 

2015: Area editor for the Neural Processing Letters Journal special issue on "Neural Networks for Vision and Robotics", Springer, May 2015.  

Teaching

I am a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and have more than 15 years teaching experience in Academia (e.g. University of Alicante, Grimsby University, University of Westminster). 

Recipient of "Westminster Teaching Excellence Team Award 2017" for my contributions to the Mathematics provision

Between 2005 and 2013 I have served as Course Leader for the BSc (Honours) Computer Games Development course at the University of Westminster.

Between 2008 and until 2012, I have participated to the Erasmus Socrates Teaching Exchange scheme (ERASMUS+) with the University of Alicante, Spain where Pervasive Systems and their applications were taught at Master level.

Since 2012 I have been External Examiner to the following courses:

1) B.A. (Honours) Games Design degree at the University of Hull

2) B.A. (Honours) Games Design and Development degree at the Teesside University 

3) B.Sc. (Honours) Games Design degree at the Leeds Beckett University 

I teach a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules with emphasis on 3D Graphics Programming, Mathematics for Games and Computing and Image Processing.

BCS Student Awards: In 2011, my final year project student (Bharat Reddy) won, from the BCS West London Branch, the award for the Best Final Year Project with the title "Virtual Reality Natural User Interfaces: Enabling Modification of Objects in 3D Virtual Space".

Finally, I am Director of Studies and Supervisor to Ph.D. students.

Research

My current research interests include Computer Vision, Sign Language Recognition, Multimedia Systems, Image Processing, Brain-Computer Interface Systems, and multi-modal Human-Computer Interaction. I am regular technical reviewer for scientific journals and conferences with high impact factor. My publication track record (+50 publications) includes 1 Springer book chapter, 7 Tier 1 journals (e.g. Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, Real-Time Image Processing) and 30 highly competitive conferences (e.g. ICCV, ECCV, ACCV, IJCNN, HCI, IWANN) .

I have been involved as PI or co-investigator in several research grants and consultancy projects::

1) ATDA-BSL:: Automated Diagnostic Toolkit for Dementia in Ageing Deaf Users of British Sign Language (BSL) (2018/2020) (RPGF1802\37). The Dunhill Medical Trust. Grant Value: £65,173. Role: Principal Investigator.

2)   Christmas Truce Tale (2013/2015)(Ref:UT719930). Heritage Lottery Fund. Grant Value: £107,000. Role: Co-Principal Investigator.

3)   Dr John Snow and the London Cholera Epidemic Games (2011/2012)(Ref:UT717490). Heritage Lottery Fund and Thames Tunnel. Grant Value: £43,000. Role: Co-Principal Investigator.

4)   Augmented Reality Game Storytelling (2010)(Ref: UT716040). Collaboration voucher with Knowledge Connect. Grant Value: £10,000. Role: Principal Investigator.

as well as projects funded by the European Union (DiARTgnosis - Study of European Religious Painting (2000/2003), part of the CULTURE 2000 Programme, Grant Value: €518.782,68; working as research assistant in developing multimedia authoring toolkits.

Editorial Activities

Area Editor, Neural Processing Letters journal, Special Issue on “Neural Networks for Vision and Robotics”, Springer, May 2015. 

Organisation of scientific events

Co-chair for the 2nd Special Session on Neural Networks applied to Vision and Robotics (NNVR), part of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence 2014, WCCI 2014, China.

Co-chair for the Special Session on Active, Incremental and Autonomous Learning: Algorithms and Applications (AIAL), part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2012, Australia.

Co-chair for the Special Session on Autonomous and Incremental Learning (AIL), part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2011.

Co-chair for the Special Session on Biometric Systems for Human-machine Interaction (BHMI), part of the International Work Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, IWANN 2011, Spain.

Co-chair for the IEEE Special Session on Active and Autonomous Learning (AAL), part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2010, WCCI 2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Spain.

Co-chair for the 13th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB’08 Doctoral Symposium, 2008, UK. 

Panel Chair for the Women in Games (WiG) Conference, 2008, UK. 

Technical reviewer of papers in scientific journals

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

IEEE  Signal Processing Letters

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems

Journal of Applied Soft Computing – Elsevier

Journal of Neural Computing and Applications – Springer

Journal IET Computer Vision

Journal IET Image Processing

International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence (IJOCI) 

Membership of Committees

2009-date

PC member for the conference IET Imaging for Crime Detection and Prevention

PC member for the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN

PC member for the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems

PC member for the International Conference on Computer Games, Multimedia and Allied Technologies

PC member for the IEEE special session on Computational Intelligence for Privacy and Security (CIPS 2010)

PC member for the 2010 International Conference on Multimedia Information Networking and Security (MINES 2010), China, 2010.

PC member for the 2nd Chilean Workshop on Pattern Recognition (CWPR 2010), Chile, 2010

Publications

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.