Biography:Philip Torr

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Philip Torr

FRS FREng
Philip Torr in 2024
Born
Philip Hilaire Sean Torr

April 1966 (age 60)[1]
EducationManchester Grammar School[2]
Alma mater
Known forComputer Vision[3]
AwardsRoyal Society Wolfson Fellowship
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Vision
AI safety
AI scientist
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford
Microsoft Research
Oxford Brookes University
ThesisOutlier Detection and Motion Segmentation (1995)
Doctoral advisorDavid W. Murray[4]
Doctoral studentsPushmeet Kohli[4]
Website{{{1}}}

Philip Hilaire Sean Torr (born 1966)[1] FRS FREng[2] is a British scientist and a professor at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in machine learning and computer vision and he is a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.[5][6][3][7]

Education

Torr was privately educated at Manchester Grammar School from 1977 to 1983.[8] He graduated with a first class degree in pure mathematics from the University of Southampton in 1987,[2] and then completed a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree at the University of Oxford where his research was supervised by David W. Murray.[4][9][10]

Career and research

After his DPhil, Torr worked for another three years at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow with Andrew Zisserman in the visual geometry group.[11]

Torr left Oxford to work for six years as a research scientist for Microsoft Research, first in Redmond, Washington, US, in the Vision Technology Group, then in Cambridge, UK, founding the vision side of the Machine Learning and Perception Group.[7] He was subsequently appointed a Professor in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Oxford Brookes University. During this time he worked closely with Sony, his group is credited for computer vision on the title of the Wonderbook Book of Spells,[12][13] which sold over 660,000 units. Torr also worked closely with Oxford-based company Vicon on markerless motion capture, this work was awarded best knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) of the year in 2009.[14] In 2013, Torr returned to University of Oxford as a full professor where he established the Torr Vision group.[15]

In 2016 he founded Oxsight[1][16][17] a social enterprise[citation needed] to help people with visual impairment use computer vision techniques to enhance their life. In 2019 he founded AIstetic a company to do 3D reconstruction.[18] Torr has served as chief scientific advisor for Five AI[19] from their formation in 2016 through their journey to acquisition in 2022 by Bosch Group.[20] Torr became a Chief Scientific Advisor for DreamTech, Exient established by ex-members of the Torr Vision Group.[citation needed]

In 2024, he joined CAMEL-AI as an advisor, contributing to the first large language model (LLM) multi-agent framework and an open-source community dedicated to discovering the scaling law of agents.[21]

Torr has served as chair for conferences in his field including ECCV 2008,[22] ICCV 2013,[23] CVPR 2019[24] and ICCV 2029.[25] He was also invited as a speaker of Starmus Festival in 2024.[citation needed]

More recently, Torr's group has branched out from computer vision into the fields of AI safety and AI scientist research.[3][15][26] Torr is a fellow of the Future of Life Institute,[27] as well as distinguished research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford.[28] He is interested in ensuring that its benefits are distributed equally to all of society.[29]

Awards and honours

Torr won several awards[30] including:

  • Turing AI world leading researcher fellow in 2021[31][32]
  • Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 2021[33]
  • Elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2019[34]
  • Best Paper Award at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2010[35] for the paper Graph Cut based Inference with Co-occurrence Statistics.[36]
  • Best Science Paper at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)[37] 2010 for the paper Joint Optimisation for Object Class Segmentation and Dense Stereo Reconstruction.[38]
  • Best Paper Award at Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2008[39] for the paper Global Stereo Reconstruction under Second Order Smoothness Priors[40]
  • Honorary mention at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2007 conference[41] for the paper An Analysis of Convex Relaxations for MAP Estimation[42]
  • Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007.[43]
  • Marr Prize in computer vision in 1998.[44]
  • Torr's thesis included the algorithm design for Boujou, released by 2D3, together with Andrew Zisserman, Paul Beardsley and Andrew Fitzgibbon.[45][46] Boujou has been used in films including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1,[46] which was nominated for the 2010 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Boujou has won a Computer Graphics World Innovation Award, IABM Peter Wayne Award, and CATS Award for Innovation, and a technical Emmy Award.[47]

Personal life

Torr is the son of Harriet Torr.[2] His Who's Who entry lists his recreations as martial arts, salsa, bachata dance and war games.[2]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Anon (2016). "Philip Hilaire Sean TORR". London: Companies House. Archived from the original on 2024-04-21. https://web.archive.org/web/20240421030908/https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/sn76TPkJzmJh75vwPeHm9Tj2nQE/appointments. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Anon (2025). ",". Who's Who (177th ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U295937. https://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whoswho/U295937.  (subscription or UK public library membership required)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Philip Torr at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. ↑ "Catz Academics Awarded Prestigious AI Fellowship". https://www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/catz-fellow-awarded-prestigious-ai-fellowship/. 
  6. ↑ {{LinkedIn page}} template missing URL and not present in Wikidata.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Philip Torr, Department of Engineering Science". University of Oxford. https://eng.ox.ac.uk/people/philip-torr. 
  8. ↑ Kneale, Rachel (2021). "Old Mancunian (OM) Alumni Awards". Manchester: Manchester Grammar School. Archived from the original on 2026-04-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20260428203115/https://www.mgs-life.co.uk/article/old-mancunian-alumni-awards-2021. 
  9. ↑ Torr, Philip Hilaire Sean (1995). Outlier Detection and Motion Segmentation. ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 51487078. ProQuest 304266501.
  10. ↑ "People page, Active Vision Group". University of Oxford. https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/ActiveVision/People/index.html. 
  11. ↑ "People in the Visual Geometry Group,". University of Oxford. https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/people.html. 
  12. ↑ "Wonderbook, Book of Spells". https://www.mobygames.com/game/61326/wonderbook-book-of-spells/credits/ps3/. 
  13. ↑ "Sony’s Wonderbook: theoretical mathematics contributes to enriching the gaming experience". Research Excellence Framework. https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=10816. 
  14. ↑ "Outstanding partnership clinches major award". Oxford Brookes University News Archive. https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/01f281ea-8c33-471b-86e3-1adbcb7f124f/1/. 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Torr Vision Group". https://torrvision.com. 
  16. ↑ "These AR Glasses Could Help Legally Blind People See Again". techthelead. https://florini.sg-host.com/ar-glasses-help-legally-blind-people/. 
  17. ↑ "Oxford spinout develops smart glasses giving legally blind the ability to read and navigate". https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-spinout-develops-smart-glasses-giving-legally-blind-ability-read-navigate/. 
  18. ↑ "Oxford startup Aistetic receives £1.2m to fund new AI fashion tool". https://thebusinessmagazine.co.uk/technology-innovation/oxford-startup-aistetic-receives-1-2m-to-fund-new-ai-tool/. 
  19. ↑ "Our People at Five AI". Archived from the original on 2020-05-22. https://web.archive.org/web/20200522122242/https://five.ai/our-people/. 
  20. ↑ Bosch picks up Five.ai after the self-driving startup pivoted to B2B and then put itself up for sale at TechCrunch
  21. ↑ "CAMEL-AI". https://www.camel-ai.org. 
  22. ↑ "ECCV 2008 committees". http://eccv2008.inrialpes.fr/committees.html. 
  23. ↑ "ICCV 2013". https://projet.liris.cnrs.fr/imagine/pub/proceedings/ICCV-2013/data/home.htm. 
  24. ↑ "CVPR 2019 organizers". https://cvpr2019.thecvf.com/organizers. 
  25. ↑ "ICCV 2029". https://www.thecvf.com/?page_id=100. 
  26. ↑ Philip Torr publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (Subscription content?)
  27. ↑ "Philip Torr at Future of Life Institute". https://futureoflife.org/person/philip-torr/. 
  28. ↑ "Research Associates". https://www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk/research-associates. 
  29. ↑ "Will artificial intelligence erode our rights?". BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4q7y. 
  30. ↑ "Torr Vision Group Prizes". https://torrvision.com/prizes. 
  31. ↑ "Turing World Leader". https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/turing-ai-fellows/philip-torr. 
  32. ↑ Two Oxford University professors appointed first Turing Artificial Intelligence Research Fellows, University of Oxford
  33. ↑ Anon (2021). "Philip Torr FRS". London: Royal Society. https://royalsociety.org/people/philip-torr-35001. 
  34. ↑ Anon (2019). "Philip Torr FREng". London: Royal Academy of Engineering. https://raeng.org.uk/about-us/fellowship/new-fellows-2019/philip-torr. 
  35. ↑ Award page, ECCV 2010
  36. ↑ Ladicky, L., Russell, C., Kohli, P., Torr, P.H.S. (2010). Graph Cut Based Inference with Co-occurrence Statistics. In: Daniilidis, K., Maragos, P., Paragios, N. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2010. ECCV 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6315. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15555-0_18
  37. ↑ "BMVC 2010, BMVA news". https://bmva-archive.org.uk/bmva-news/2010-09.pdf. 
  38. ↑ Ladický, L., Sturgess, P., Russell, C. et al. Joint Optimization for Object Class Segmentation and Dense Stereo Reconstruction. Int J Comput Vis 100, 122–133 (2012). doi:10.1007/s11263-011-0489-0
  39. ↑ "List of best paper awards for CVPR". https://tc.computer.org/tcpami/2022/08/22/cvpr-best-paper-award/. 
  40. ↑ O. Woodford, P. Torr, I. Reid and A. Fitzgibbon, "Global Stereo Reconstruction under Second-Order Smoothness Priors," in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 31, no. 12, pp. 2115-2128, Dec. 2009, doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2009.131
  41. ↑ "NIPS awards". 2007. https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2007/Awards. 
  42. ↑  , Wikidata Q77682319
  43. ↑ Anon (2013). "Trustees’ report and financial statement". London: Royal Society. https://royalsociety.org/-/media/about-us/governance/2013-11-20-trustees-report.pdf. 
  44. ↑ "Best ICCV Best Paper Award (Marr Prize)". https://www.thecvf.com/?page_id=413#ICCV. 
  45. ↑ Philip H. S. Torr and David W. Murray Outlier detection and motion segmentation, Proc. SPIE 2059, Sensor Fusion VI, (1993); doi:10.1117/12.150246
  46. ↑ 46.0 46.1 Anon (2014). "UOA15-10: Boujou: special effects software for the film industry". https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=20085. 
  47. ↑ Godfrey, Leigh (2002). "2002 Engineering Emmy Awards For 2D3's Boujou And Apple's FinalCut Pro". Animation World Network. https://www.awn.com/news/2002-engineering-emmy-awards-2d3s-boujou-and-apples-finalcut-pro. 



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