Current Research Interests

• Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence
• Computer vision and sensing for small robots
• Reinforcement learning
• Neuroscience of perception and action
• Building embodied intelligent agents
• Information theory applied to fundamental physics
• AI exploration of theories of physics
• Number theory

Prior Experience

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering with first class honors
  School of Electrical Engineering, Bath, UK, 1986-1990
• Electronic Engineer
  GEC Marconi Avionics / GEC Sensors, Basildon, UK, 1989-1991
• PhD in Computational Neuroscience and Visual Perception
  School of Mathematical Sciences, Bath, UK, 1991-1996
• Software Engineer in developing MPEG-4 video compression
  Partnership in Advanced Computing Technologies, Bristol University, SGS-Thompson Microelectronics, Bristol, UK, 1996-1997
• Extensive career at Microsoft / Microsoft Research
  Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA, 1997-2015
  • Image and video data compression, MPEG-4 standardisation
  • Real-time optical-flow based video frame interpolation
  • Computer vision and 3D graphics
  • Real-time image feature matching and tracking
  • Robust model estimation for augmented reality
  • 3D reconstruction
  • Panoramic image stitching
  • GPU programming for real-time multi-view stereo
  • Data parallel optimization for signal processing and image manipulation
  • Scale-space and wavelet representations, and statistics of natural images and video
  • Extracting scale-invariant image descriptors for multi-view matching in large media datasets
  • Robust probabilistic data-fitting
  • Machine learning of image patch embeddings
  • Convolutional neural networks for image understanding
• Research Consultant
  Impressive Machines LLC, USA, Murley Moss Research, UK, 2015-

Publications and Patents

During my time at Microsoft Research I co-authored papers and patents with:

• Michael Cohen Senior Fellow, Meta
• Matthew Brown Principal Scientist, Wayve
• Richard Hartley Professor and Group Head, Computer Vision Group, Australian National University
• Gang Hua Vice President, Multimodal Experiences Research Lab, Dolby Laboratories
• Sing Bing Kang Distinguished Scientist, Zillow Group
• Richard Szeliski Distinguished Scientist, Google DeepMind
• Desney Tan Principal Researcher and Director, Microsoft Research Medical Devices Group
• Matt Uyttendaele Formerly at Facebook (Meta)
• Larry Zitnick Lead Research Scientist, Facebook AI Research (Meta)

Below you will find a selection of my publications:

• Matthew Brown, Gang Hua, and Simon Winder
  Discriminant Learning of Local Image Descriptors
  in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Computer Society, Vol.33, No.1, pp. 43-57, January, 2011.
• Richard Szeliski, Simon Winder, and Matt Uyttendaele
  High-Quality Multi-Pass Image Resampling
  MSR Tech Report no. MSR-TR-2010-10, February 2010.
• Simon Winder, Gang Hua, and Matthew Brown
  Picking the Best Daisy
  in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE Computer Society, June 2009.
• James Fogarty, Desney Tan, Ashish Kapoor, and Simon Winder
  CueFlik: Interactive Concept Learning in Image Search
  in CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2008.
• Gang Hua, Matthew Brown, and Simon Winder
  Discriminant Embedding for Local Image Descriptors
  in International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2007.
• Simon Winder and Matthew Brown
  Learning Local Image Descriptors
  in IEEE Computer Society Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2007.
• Larry Zitnick, Jie Sun, Richard Szeliski, and Simon Winder
  Object Instance Recognition Using Triplets of Feature Symbols
  MSR Tech Report no. MSR-TR-2007-53, April 2007.
• Matthew Brown, Simon Winder, and Richard Szeliski
  Multi-Image Matching using Multi-Scale Oriented Patches
  in IEEE Computer Society Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE Computer Society, June 2005.
• Matthew Brown, Richard Szeliski, and Simon Winder
  Multi-Scale Oriented Patches
  MSR Tech Report no. MSR-TR-2004-133, December 2004.
• Sing Bing Kang, Charles Lawrence Zitnick, Matthew Uyttendaele, Simon Winder, and Richard Szeliski
  Free-Viewpoint Video with Stereo and Matting
  in Picture Coding Symposium, San Francisco, CA, December 2004.
• C. Zitnick, S.B. Kang, M. Uyttendaele, S. Winder, and R. Szeliski
  High-Quality Video View Interpolation Using a Layered Representation
  in ACM SIGGRAPH, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., August 2004.
• Matthew Uyttendaele, Antonio Criminisi, Sing Bing Kang, Simon Winder, Richard Hartley, and Richard Szeliski
  Image-based Interactive Exploration of Real-World Environments
  in IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (CG&A), vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 52-63, IEEE Computer Society, May 2004.
• Matthew Uyttendaele, Antonio Criminisi, Sing Bing Kang, Simon Winder, Richard Hartley, and Richard Szeliski
  High-quality Image-based Interactive Exploration of Real-World Environments
  MSR Tech Report no. MSR-TR-2003-61, October 2003.
• Simon Winder
  Including Contrast Gain Control in a Parallel Simulation of the Visual Cortex
  in Computational Neursocience: Trends in Research 1995, J. M. Bower (editor), Academic Press Inc., 297-302, 1996.
• Simon Winder
  Simulation of Retinal Contrast Gain Control Mechanisms
  in Computational Neursocience: Trends in Research 1995, J. M. Bower (editor), Academic Press Inc., 291-296, 1996.
• N. E. O'Connor and S. A. J. Winder
  Current Developments in MPEG-4 Video
  First Advanced Digital Video Compression Engineering Conference, 89-96. Presented at ADVICE'96, Jesus College Cambridge, UK, July 8-11, 1996.
• S. A. J. Winder
  A Model for Biological Winner-Take-All Neural Competition Employing Inhibitory using Modulation of NMDA-Mediated Excitatory Gain
  Neurocomputing 26-27, 1999, 587-592.
• S. A. J. Winder
  Computer Simulation of Interactions Responsible for Length and Width Tuning in the Striate Cortex
  presented at AVA'96, University of Reading, UK, April 1-3, 1996.
• Simon Winder
  Image Descriptor Quantization
  April 2014, Patent: US8712159B21
• Michael Kallay, Simon Winder
  Surface Normal Computation on Noisy Samples of Points
  May 2015, Patent: US9043186B21

Writing

Here you will find a selection of my writing on a variety of topics, including AI, robotics and physics.

TBD