Alison Todman

Alison Todman joined the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences, Coventry University as a Senior Lecturer in July 2000. Prior to her appointment, she carried out research (first as a student and subsequently as a research fellow and temporary lecturer) at the University of Birmingham, where she received her PhD in Computer Science in 1998. Her research interests lie in computational modelling of human visual processes based on psychophysical and neurophysiological data, and in the investigation of perceptual and cognitive processes underlying the interpretation of visual stimuli.

She is a member of the IMD (Informatics in Media and Design) research group at Coventry, which focuses on multidisciplinary research in Computer Science and creative disciplines. The work of this group includes projects relating to pervasive computing in sensor networks, industrial and information design, multimedia, visualisation and computer supported cooperative working.

A large part of her work has been involved with the application of visually inspired methods to the analysis of biomedical images, and she has published a number of papers on this subject. Her PhD research, in which she developed a computational model of perceptual closure that was then adapted to perform segmentation in histological images, investigated feature extraction and grouping mechanisms associated with low-level vision. This study formed the basis of further work aimed at the development of quantitative tools for the classification of images used in the diagnosis of cancer. More recently, she has been exploring issues related to the nature of expertise and learning in the interpretation of images, through psychophysical experiments using image similarity techniques and tracking of user behaviour.

Alison Todman is a member of the British Machine Vision Association and the IEEE. She has acted as an associate editor and reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine and as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering on several occasions. In collaboration with the Newcastle-upon-Tyne? Hospital Trust, she has just obtained funding from the Department of health to investigate processes underlying the interpretation of biomedical images used in the training of pathologists. She was also funded by the Royal Society to present work on the development of quantitative measures for the analysis of colorectal images at an IEEE conference on electrical and computer engineering in 2002.

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