John Collomosse
Senior Principal Scientist
London
AI & Machine Learning
Computer Vision, Imaging & Video
Content IntelligenceProf. John Collomosse is a Senior Principal Scientist (Sr. Director) and manages the Trusted Media Intelligence (TMI) lab in Adobe Research. John leads research for Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) which he co-founded in 2019. CAI now has over 6,000 members and underpins the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) the cross-industry standard for media provenance. John provides core technical leadership to C2PA chairing cross-industry task forces on watermarking and distributed ledger technologies.
John’s research sits at the intersection of AI, signal processing, and decentralised systems, with a focus on media provenance to combat misinformation and online harms, and on data attribution and integrity for responsible AI. His work on content fingerprinting is deployed across Adobe products including Photoshop, Lightroom, and Firefly, protecting millions of assets. His watermarking technologies ship in Adobe Content Authenticity (ACA) and form part of Adobe’s durable content credentials pipeline.
Beyond provenance, John has pioneered visual search and similarity technologies including sketch-, style-, and pose-based search – which have been demonstrated at Adobe MAX and shipped in products such as Behance ‘More Like This’.
John has published over 170 peer-reviewer papers (h-Index 43) and holds 30+ patents. He is an Adobe Distinguished Inventor. He has over 25 years’ experience across computer vision, graphics, and AI, and completed his PhD at the University of Bath in 2004.
Concurrently, John is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey, Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) , where he founded and directs DECaDE, the UKRI National Research Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy. Prior projects include TAPESTRY, COMEHERE and ARCHANGEL which pioneered the use of AI and blockchain to secure national archives worldwide. This early example of durable provenance markers for media integrity influenced the technical direction of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative.
John has previously held research roles at HP Labs, Vodafone Munich and IBM Research Hursley. He is a Fellow of the IET (FIET), Life Fellow of the BCS (FBCS), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a Senior member of the IEEE, and a Chartered Engineer (CEng). He served on the EPSRC advisory team for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) portfolio (2018-2024), on the UK Government DCMS Technical Advisory group on Copyright and AI (2025-2026), and is a member of the DCMS Creative Industries Council (CIC) since 2025.
