Kirk Martinez is a Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

UK. He gained a BSc in Physics from the University of Reading and a PhD in Image Processing in the department of Electronic Systems Engineering at the

University of Essex The University of Essex is a public university, public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, Essex is one of the original plate glass university, plate glass universities. Essex's shield consists of the an ...

. While Arts Computing Lecturer at

Birkbeck College London , mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck. , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £4.3 m (2014) , budget = £10 ...

(1987–96) he pioneered the digital imaging of paintings together with The National Gallery, London in the European project VASARI (1980s). This led to development of art imaging projects to print accurate art books (MARC project), view high detail images on the web (Viseum project) and find art images online (Artiste, SCULPTEUR and eCHASE). He has published this research in books on image processing and computer architecture as well as Transactions of the IEEE on

content-based image retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content ( QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching ...

He was an advisor on the imaging and image processing required for the

Archimedes Palimpsest The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the ''Ostomachion'' and the ' ...

. Recent research led to a new imaging system for ancient seals together with Oxford University - which is helping to capture and read historic texts. He is one of the founders of the Electronics and the Visual Arts:

EVA Conferences The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts conferences (EVA Conferences for short, aka Electronic Information, the Visual Arts and Beyond) are a series of international Interdisciplinary arts, interdisciplinary conferences mainly in Europe, but a ...

. He helped to found the Earth and Space Science Informatics focus group of the

American Geophysical Union The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists and enthusiasts that according to their website includes 130,000 people (not members). AGU's act ...

, is on the executive committee and has run ten annual sessions on applying sensor networks to earth science. In 2017 he received the AGU's Leptoukh award for contributions to this area. He is the co-founder of the VIPS (software) image processing package together with John Cupitt (

National Gallery London The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director of ...

and now Imperial College London). This is used widely and available as a standard package in Linux distributions as well as for Microsoft Windows/OS X. It is known for mosaicing, colour and parallel processing/performance. It has become the fastest way to generate thumbnails and resize images on web servers so is in use in Wikipedia itself and sites such as Booking.com. His current research is on Environmental Sensor Networks which are

wireless sensor networks Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental c ...

for studying/monitoring the environment, particularly in relation to glaciers and

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

(Glacsweb project). This research featured o
BBC technology news
and th
BBC's News
it was the first wireless sensor network designed to be used in/under glaciers. His work to test the technology for landslide detection was also on BBC news. In 2014 he deployed what was probably the first low power, sub-GHz,

6LoWPAN 6LoWPAN (acronym of "IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks") in '6LoWPAN: The Embedded Internet', Shelby and Bormann redefine the 6LoWPAN acronym as "IPv6 over lowpower wireless area networks," arguing that "Personal" is no longer rel ...

fully-IP based Internet of Things environmental sensor network in the

Cairngorms The Cairngorms ( gd, Am Monadh Ruadh) are a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland closely associated with the mountain Cairn Gorm. The Cairngorms became part of Scotland's second national park (the Cairngorms National Park) on 1 S ...

External links

His home pageGlacsweb

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martinez, Kirk 1962 births Living people English computer scientists Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Academics of the University of Southampton British computer scientists