Edwin Hancock,

FREng Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in the UK and from arou ...

(24 June 1956 – 19 January 2024) was a British computer scientist at the

University of York The University of York (abbreviated as or ''York'' for Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a public Collegiate university, collegiate research university in York, England. Established in 1963, the university has expanded to more than thir ...

who specialised in computer vision and pattern recognition.

Education

Edwin Hancock graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1977, a PhD in high energy nuclear physics in 1981 and a Doctor of Science degree by publication in 2008 from

Durham University Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...

. His PhD thesis was entitled "''The π π Ʌ channel from Kp reactions in the Ʌ (1690) region''" and his D.Sc. thesis "''Contributions to pattern recognition and computer vision''".PhD Thesis Durham University
Retrieved 22 April 2017.D.Sc. Thesis Durham University, Palace Green Library: Special Collections Shelfmark SD++ 00842/008843.

Career

Hancock was Emeritus Professor of Computer Vision in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, and Adjunct Professor and Principal Investigator of the Beijing Innovation Centre for Big Data and Brain Computing at Beihang University. He commenced his research career in the field of high energy nuclear physics, working on

bubble chamber A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded th ...

experiments performed at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

and

SLAC SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, United States. Founded in 1962, the laboratory is now sponsored ...

between 1977 and 1984. During this period he used

partial wave analysis Partial-wave analysis, in the context of quantum mechanics, refers to a technique for solving scattering problems by decomposing each wave into its constituent angular-momentum components and solving using boundary conditions. Partial wave analys ...

to study the

angular momentum Angular momentum (sometimes called moment of momentum or rotational momentum) is the rotational analog of Momentum, linear momentum. It is an important physical quantity because it is a Conservation law, conserved quantity – the total ang ...

resonances of Ʌ and Σ hyperons and was involved in the first determination of

charm quark The charm quark, charmed quark, or c quark is an elementary particle found in composite subatomic particles called hadrons such as the J/psi meson and the charmed baryons created in particle accelerator collisions. Several bosons, including th ...

lifetimes. In 1985 he changed fields to work in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, and most recently undertook research in the use of graph-based methods in computer vision, pattern recognition and complex networks. He focused on how pattern recognition and machine learning can be performed using data in the form of graphs, trees and strings. He was best known for his work on graph matching and spectral graph theory. He also worked on physics based vision, where he has focused on how to recover surface shape and surface sub-structure from information conveyed by the scattering of light and from polarisation measurements. Retrieved 22 April 2017. He has published extensively on these topics. Retrieved 22 April 2017. Hancock was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021, Retrieved 23 September 2021. named

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

(IEEE) in 2016 ''for contributions to pattern recognition and computer vision'', and as a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2000.IAPR Fellows.
Retrieved 22 April 2017. He was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the

University of Alicante The University of Alicante (, ; , ; also known by the acronym ''UA'') was established in 1979 on the basis of the Center for University Studies (CEU), which was founded in 1968. The university main campus is located in San Vicente del Raspeig/San ...

in 2015. Doctorate honoris causa U. Alicante.
Retrieved 22 April 2017. In 2016 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal ''

Pattern Recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

''. Between 2016 and 2018 he was second vice-president of the

International Association for Pattern Recognition The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), is an international association of organizations dedicated to computer vision or pattern recognition. It only admits one organization per country or territory. Individual people partic ...

.IAPR Exco.
Retrieved 22 April 2017. Between 2009 and 2014, he held a

Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award The Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship, known as the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award until 2020, is a 5 years fellowship awarded by the Royal Society since 2000. The scheme is described by the Royal Society as providing ''long-term flexib ...

.Royal Society Research Fellows.
Retrieved 22 April 2017. In 1991 he was awarded the Seventeenth Annual Pattern Recognition Award, for his paper titled "Discrete Relaxation", co-authored with Josef Kittler and published in the journal Pattern Recognition, and in 1999 an honourable mention in the Twentyfourth Award for the paper "Matching Delaunay Graphs", with Andrew M. Finch and Richard C. Wilson. The British Machine Vision Association awarded him its Distinguished Fellowship for 2016.BMVA Distinguished Fellows
Retrieved 10 August 2017. In 2018 he received the Pierre Devijver Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition.Pierre Devijver Award Winners
Retrieved 15 January 2020.

Death

Hancock died from cancer on 19 January 2024, at the age of 67.

Selected publications

;Research Articles * Richard C. Wilson, Edwin R. Hancock, Structural Matching by Discrete Relaxation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 19(6): 634–648 (1997). * Andrew D. J. Cross, Edwin R. Hancock, Graph Matching With a Dual-Step EM Algorithm. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 20(11): 1236–1253 (1998). * Philip L. Worthington, Edwin R. Hancock, New Constraints on Data-Closeness and Needle Map Consistency for Shape-from-Shading. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 21(12): 1250–1267 (1999). * Bin Luo, Edwin R. Hancock, Structural Graph Matching Using the EM Algorithm and Singular Value Decomposition. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 23(10): 1120–1136 (2001). * Marco Carcassoni, Edwin R. Hancock, Correspondence Matching with Modal Clusters. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 25(12): 1609–1615 (2003 * Richard C. Wilson, Edwin R. Hancock, Bin Luo, Pattern Vectors from Algebraic Graph Theory. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 27(7): 1112–1124 (2005). * Antonio Robles-Kelly, Edwin R. Hancock, Graph Edit Distance from Spectral Seriation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 27(3): 365–378 (2005). * William A. P. Smith, Edwin R. Hancock, Recovering Facial Shape Using a Statistical Model of Surface Normal Direction. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28(12): 1914–1930 (2006). * Andrea Torsello, Edwin R. Hancock, Learning Shape-Classes Using a Mixture of Tree-Unions. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28(6): 954–967 (2006). * Gary A. Atkinson, Edwin R. Hancock, Shape Estimation Using Polarization and Shading from Two Views. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 29(11): 2001–2017 (2007). * Huaijun Qiu, Edwin R. Hancock, Clustering and Embedding Using Commute Times. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 29(11): 1873–1890 (2007).

References

Retrieved 22 September 2021.

External links

Official website at the University of York.
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hancock, Edwin 1956 births 2024 deaths Fellows of the IEEE Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders Alumni of Grey College, Durham Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Academics of the University of York British computer scientists Fellows of the International Association for Pattern Recognition People associated with CERN