Dr.Rosie Cowell, Academic Fellow in the Computing Laboratory, has been awarded the 2009 Cognitive Science Conference (COGSCI 2009) Perception/Action Modeling Prize for her work with Professor Gary Cottrell at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), on face recognition. The prize includes an honorarium of $1000.

The prize is awarded by the Cognitive Science Awards Committee, and is sponsored by the Cognitive Science Center (COGSCI). It will be presented to Rosie during the COGSCI 2009 conference which is being held at VU University, Amsterdam, later this year. Rosie will present the winning paper, 'Virtual Brain Reading: A Connectionist Approach to Understanding fMRI' at the conference.

In 2008, Rosie spent six months working at UCSD with Gary Cottrell, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. The joint work involved investigating how people perceive and remember other human faces, and the brain systems underlying these abilities. The work helped to bridge a crucial gap between different techniques for understanding face processing - namely, the use of brain-imaging techniques and computational modelling. This work formed the basis for the content of the winning paper.

Rosie is a Research Council supported UK Academic Fellow at the University of Kent, Computing Laboratory. Her research interests are visual perception, face recognition and visual recognition memory. Her work straddles the computing and psychology departments and she is a member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems at the University of Kent.

Published 22 May 2009
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk