Dr Hubert P. H. Shum is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Durham University researching in the fields of computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning and biomedical engineering, particularly focusing on the modelling of human-related data. Before this, he worked as the Director of Research/Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at RIKEN Japan. He received his PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh, his Master and Bachelor degrees from the City University of Hong Kong. To develop his team, he led research projects as the Principal Investigator awarded by EPSRC, the Ministry of Defence (DASA) and the Royal Society. This facilitated him to supervise more than 20 PhDs, recruit multiple Post-doctoral Researchers, and collaborate with international researchers from the UK, China, France, Japan and India. To engage the academic and industrial networks, he has chaired international conferences such as Pacific Graphics, BMVC, ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics SCA and ACM SIGGRAPH MIG. Contributing to the research community, he has served as an Associate Editor for Computer Graphics Forum, a Guest Editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision, and a Program Committee member in 15 conferences such as Eurographics, CVPR and Pacific Graphics. He has authored over 150 research publications.

Durham University is ranked top 100 in the world and the 6^th in the UK. As a member of the elite Russell Group, Durham University focuses on research excellence delivered by world-class academics. It is the third oldest university in England, following Oxford and Cambridge, with the campus's Cathedral and Castle being a UNESCO world heritage. It is located at Durham in North East England, which is one of the safest cities in the UK with an affordable living cost. The Department of Computer Science is one of the fastest-growing departments in the University, supported by major investments in staff recruitment and academic infrastructure. 97% of its research outputs are considered as “world-leading” and “internationally excellent” by the UK Research Excellence Framework.