Prof. John Collomosse is a principal scientist and research manager in Adobe Research’s Image & Language Lab (ILO) lab, and leads the Cross-modal Representation Learning (XRL) team.
John leads research for Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and is a core technical advisor to the initiative since his early involvement in its inception in 2019. Now with 3000+ members, CAI leads a cross-industry standards group (C2PA; Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) where John chairs cross-industry task forces on watermarking, fingerprinting and Blockchain.
John’s research intersects Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), with focus on media provenance to fight misinformation and online harms, and on improving data integrity and attribution for responsible AI. John’s content fingerprinting research is used to protect millions of images daily across Adobe’s platforms such as Photoshop, Lightroom and generative AI Firefly tools. John has also pioneered several visual search technologies, such as style, sketch and pose based search. These have been demoed at Adobe MAX and shipped in products such as Behance ‘More Like This’ style similarity search. John has published over 130 papers and over 30 patents, and is an Adobe Distinguished Inventor.
John has over 20 years experience at the intersection of Computer Vision, Graphics and AI, completing his PhD on Image and Video Stylization at the University of Bath in 2004. John is concurrently a full professor at the University of Surrey, Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) where he is the founder and director of DECaDE, the UKRI Natioanl Research Centre for the Decentralized Creative Economy. Notably, he led the ARCHANGEL project which pioneered use of AI and Blockchain for provenance to tamper-proof National Archives around the world and was called out as a highlight of the UK Science Council (EPSRC) Digital Economy research programme.
John has also spent time elsewhere working on industry R&D in Computer Vision/AI, including at HP Labs, Vodafone Munich and IBM Research Hursley. He is a Fellow of the IET (FIET), a Senior member of the IEEE, and a Chartered Engineer (CEng). He is a member of the EPSRC advisory team for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) portfolio (2018-2024).