Inaugural Lecture: Finding New Dogs with Old Tricks: Applying Distance Geometry to Multimedia Search
Distance geometry is about the study of objects which can only be compared by their distance from each other.
The intuition of distances is quite easy, as we are surrounded by objects in the real world which have this property. In the 1930s however determining some more abstract properties of such spaces became a “hot topic” in mathematical research.
This talk gives a background to the concepts of metric search. From the core concepts, we will go on to show how our recent work uses mathematical results from the early 20th century to address some pressing 21st century problems, such as Internet child abuse and copyright violation. There is some maths involved, but explained with pictures and models.
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Prof Richard Connor graduated with a BSc Hons in Computational Science from the University of St Andrews in 1985, followed by PhD (Types and Polymorphism in Persistent Programming Systems) also from St Andrews in 1991. Held SERC Postdoctoral (Internet Programming Systems) and EPSRC Advanced (Data and Program on the Internet) Research Fellowships at St Andrews and Glasgow Universities respectively. Has a not unreasonable claim to have co-invented Cloud Computing, dating from the late 1990s, via these and also commercial involvement with Reuters, Enigmatec, and Cloudsoft; author of three world-wide protected patents in this domain. Moved in 1999 to a Chair of Computer Science at Strathclyde University; Head of Department there from 2004-2007, and then to University of Stirling as Head of Division, Computing Science & Mathematics in July 2018.