Research Excellence Award for Dr Tom Flavel

On the 16th September, Dr Tom Flavel was given the Best Interdisciplinary Research Award for the Faculty of Science and Engineering, in recognition of his work on the pump-priming project "MediaQuery: Harnessing AI to enable the systematic search and analysis of large subtitled audio-visual datasets for sociocultural research". He is the project co-lead and postdoctoral researcher of the said project.

Tom's expertise in the social sciences is crucial in making MediaQuery truly interdisciplinary, employing sociological theories to inform the development of multi-modal AI (vision, language, speech) models for analysing the content of the TV programmes contained in the BBC-AVS 10K Dataset. Additionally, he strived to make this dataset–and the enriched annotations contained therein–accessible to any researcher in the university, by setting up an interactive media browsing platform.

Congratulations, Tom!