Personal Details

      Name:                   David Peter Alfred Corney

      Date of Birth:      7/12/1971

      Marital Status:    Married

      Nationality:          British

      Email:                   d.corney@ucl.ac.uk

      Homepage:          http://www.dcorney.com/

Personal Profile

I am currently employed as a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ophthalmology, part of University College, London. I’m investigating various aspects of human and insect vision, such as the appearance of optical illusions and the perception of lightness, colour, depth and so on. My main approach is to use statistical and machine learning tools, such as neural networks, to produce tools that learn to “see” simple images, and then analyse their behaviour.

Until 2006, I was a Senior Research Fellow in the Computer Science department at University College, London, where I developed an information extraction tool (called “BioRAT”) to help life sciences researchers to find and analyse relevant publications. This work was in collaboration with a number of academic and commercial organisations.

My PhD focussed on applying machine learning techniques to industrial data mining problems. I am interested in the transfer of knowledge between industry and academia, and drawing on the different strengths of each. I have several years of professional computing experience, when I acquired many technical and non-technical skills, including software analysis and design, programming in several languages, liaison with clients and supervision of junior colleagues. I returned to university to undertake an MSc degree and then a PhD, in order to explore and expand my interests in machine learning, and in the application of novel techniques to industrial problems.

Education

1998-2002 PhD Computer Science at University College, London. My thesis is “Intelligent Analysis of Small Data Sets for Food Design”, and concerns the development and evaluation of machine learning methods, motivated by product design work within the food industry. The aim is to model consumer preferences of food products, by learning relationships from very small data sets. Areas researched include feature selection, cluster analysis, outlier detection, regression, and Bayesian belief networks.

Unilever plc sponsored this work, and provided data and advice throughout. I spent 6 months at one of their research centres (Colworth House), which allowed me to disseminate current academic thinking within Unilever and learn more about their approaches to data analysis.

The research was undertaken within the Postgraduate Training Partnership (PTP) established between Sira Ltd and University College London. PTPs are a joint initiative of the DTI and EPSRC. As a PTP Associate, I attended several training courses, including management, marketing, finance and presentation skills. I also attended a residential “business game” training session jointly organised by the DTI and EPSRC.

1997-1998 MSc Computational Intelligence (with Distinction) at Plymouth University. This included study of adaptive intelligent systems such as genetic algorithms and neural networks, and their application to engineering, business and financial systems. My thesis reported an investigation into using Genetic Programming as a tool for high-dimensional symbolic regression and system identification. This work was in collaboration with Unilever plc, and involved modelling chemical data sets. The degree also included modules in project management and communication skills.

1991-1994  BSc (Hons.) Cognitive Science, Class 2 (ii) from Exeter University. This included study of artificial intelligence, neural networks, perception, cognition and linguistics, along with more general computer science and psychology modules.

Publications and Technical Reports

Journals

Corney, David, and R. Beau Lotto. 2007. “What Are Lightness Illusions and Why Do We See Them?” PLoS Computational Biology 3, no. 9:e180.

Corney, D. P. A., Buxton, B. F., Langdon W.B. and Jones, D. T. (2004) "BioRAT: Extracting Biological Information from Full-length Papers", Bioinformatics, vol. 20(17), pp. 3206-13.

Corney, D. P. A. "Food Bytes: Intelligent Systems in the Food Industry" (2002) British Food Journal, vol. 104 (10), pp. 787-805.

Conferences

Corney, D. P. A., Byrne, E.L., Buxton, B. F. and Jones, D. T. (2005) “A Logical Framework for Template Creation and Information Extraction” in Foundations of Semantic Oriented Data and Web Mining workshop, part of ICDM2005 (the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining).

Corney, D. P. A. (2000) "Designing Food with Bayesian Belief Networks" ACDM 2000 Fourth International Conference on Adaptive Computing in Design and Manufacture, April 26th - 28th, University of Plymouth.

Corney, D. P. A. and Parmee, I. (1999) N-Dimensional Surface Mapping Using Genetic Programming (Poster) GECCO 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Florida, USA .

Technical Reports

Corney, D. P. A., Byrne, E.L., Buxton, B. F. and Jones, D. T. (2005) “A Logical Framework for Template Creation and Information Extraction” UCL-CS Technical Report: RN/05/23

Corney, D. P. A., Buxton, B. F., Langdon W.B., Charlwood, J., Woollard, P.M. and Jones, D. T. (2003) "Extracting Biological Information from Full-length Papers" UCL-CS Technical Report: RN/03/17.

Corney, D. P. A. (2001) "Feature Selection with Very Small Data Sets" Unilever Research Technical Report CW 01 0136.

Corney, D. P. A. and Parmee, I. (1999) N-Dimensional Surface Mapping Using Genetic Programming Technical Report PEDC-04-99, Engineering Design Centre, University of Plymouth.

Grants awarded

                Co-applicant for BBSRC grant BB/C507253/1 “Biological Information Extraction for Genome and Superfamily Annotation.”  Total value: £264,048. This funded part of my work as a research fellow at UCL on the BioRAT project.

                Co-applicant for BBSRC grant BB/D006457/1 “BioText London: a biomedical text mining workshop” held at Birkbeck, University of London, in November 2005. Total value: £3,000.

Employment

         July 2006-present Research fellow, Institute of Ophthalmology, UCL. I work in collaboration with Dr Beau Lotto, where I develop neural network applications in Matlab and training these networks to make predictions from ambiguous stimuli. This is part of a larger research project looking at visual perception, and relating this to historical experience.

         February 2004 – February 2006 Part-time tutor / teaching assistant for the Open and Distance Learning Unit of Queen Mary, University of London. I taught several undergraduate Computer Science modules to distance learning students, on an ad hoc basis. This involved online teaching and discussion with students from a wide variety of backgrounds, along with coursework and exam preparation and marking.

         November 2001 – July 2006 Senior Research Fellow at University College, London, Department of Computer Science. From 2001-2004, I worked with a major pharmaceutical company to develop software to aid their drug-development programs. This collaboration later continued and broadened to include a second pharmaceutical company and several academic biomedical research groups. The software (“BioRAT”) is designed to locate documents on the internet, and to extract useful information from them to build a database. The software is available from http://bioinf.cs.ucl.ac.uk/biorat, along with further documentation.

             My work also involved undergraduate and Master’s level project supervision, and some classroom-based teaching support work.

         March 2002-July 2003 Part-time research associate, Institute of Ophthalmology, UCL. I carried out some research work in collaboration with Dr Beau Lotto, which involved developing neural network applications in Matlab and training these networks to make predictions from ambiguous stimuli. This was part of a larger research project looking at the perception of brightness, and relating this to historical experience.

April -September 1999 Part-time research consultant, Computer Science, UCL. During the first year of my PhD, I was employed as a research consultant at UCL as part of the AIMEDIA project in 1999. This ESPRIT-funded project bought together European retailers and academics, along with marketing and software companies. The project aim was to develop systems to produce targeted advertising for home shoppers. My work included the evaluation of possible data mining tools and an initial set of data mining studies, and concluded with several co-authored reports and presentations to the partners.

         February 1995-September 1997 Analyst Programmer at Fraser Williams plc, a London software house, where I was involved in designing and programming two large-scale database systems. These were both bespoke systems, and involved long-term projects for clients drawn from both the Government and private sectors. Besides programming, my responsibilities included visiting these clients on-site to discuss and clarify their needs, and occasionally to provide training courses. I also took responsibility for supervising more junior programmers and providing on-the-job training. I tested software, and wrote both user and technical documentation.

Other Skills and Competencies

Computing Skills

      I have professional experience of several major programming languages and operating systems, including Matlab, Java, C++, Visual Basic, SQL, Prolog and PRO-IV, under Windows and UNIX systems.

Other Achievements and Interests

·         Music: I enjoy creating experimental music and sound recordings, including some collaborative work. I also play the clarinet.

·         Rudimentary knowledge of French (including taking evening classes, 1999-2000)

·         Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award (1990), including planning and executing several expeditions, in teams of six people.

·         Clean driving licence since 1989.

Contact address

Institute of Ophthalmology

University College London

11-43 Bath Street

EC1V 9EL

Telephone: 020 7608 6840