Dr. Chris Hughes
School of Science, Engineering and Environment
Current positions
Lecturer
Biography
Dr Chris Hughes is a Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at Salford University, UK. His research is focused heavily on developing computer science solutions to promote inclusivity and diversity throughout the broadcast industry. This aims to ensure that broadcast experiences are inclusive across different languages, addressing the needs of those with hearing and low vision problems, learning difficulties and the aged. He was a partner in the H2020 Immersive Accessibility (ImAc) Project.
Previously he worked for the UX group within BBC R&D where he was responsible for developing the concept of responsive subtitles and demonstrated several methods for automatically recovering and phonetically realigning subtitles. He has a particular interest in accessible services and is currently focused on developing new methods for providing accessibility services within an immersive context, such as Virtual Reality and 360 degree video.
His Ph. D was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as a joint project between the Universities at Bangor, Swansea, Leeds, and Manchester as part of a project to develop 'An Advanced Environment for Enabling Visual Supercomputing'. As part of my research I developed a novel approach to Augmented Reality (AR) enabling real world objects to be tracked by extracting feature points from the users viewpoint, giving a natural interface for interfacing with the computer graphics.
Areas of research
Computer Graphics and Visualization, Broadcast engineering, Accessibility, Web development, Haptics, Medical Simulation
Areas of supervision
Visualisation, Broadcast, VR/AR/XR, Production, Accessibility
- Computer Graphics
My core research focuses on accessible VR/XR and I am now a key contributor to the W3C Immersive captioning group. My research has been focused heavily on developing computer science solutions to promote inclusivity and diversity throughout the broadcast industry. This aims to ensure that broadcast experiences are inclusive across different languages, addressing the needs of those with hearing and low vision problems, learning difficulties and the aged.
Previously I held a H2020 EU grant for €205,452.50 (out of the total grant of €2,682,227.50) to focus on moving previous work in to the immersive content. The goal of project was to explore how accessibility services can be integrated with immersive media, such as 360-degree video and virtual reality. This project explored new deployment methods for accessibility services (Subtitles, Audio Description, Audio Subtitling, Sign Language) within immersive environments. It is anticipated that these services will provide a high impact experience to a wide audience.
I have also been appointed as a full Management Committee Member of an EU COST action (https://www.cost.eu/cost-action/leading-platform-for-european-citizens-industries-academia-and-policymakers-in-media-accessibility/ ) which will run until 2024. This will personally give me access to EU funds to attend meetings, networking, conferences, organising events and workshops and run small research prototypes.
I previously worked for BBC R&D where my research focused on accessibility in the broadcast pipeline.
- Full Management Committee Member of an EU COST action LEADME (https://www.cost.eu/cost-action/leading-platform-for-european-citizens-industries-academia-and-policymakers-in-media-accessibility/ )
- Fellow of the Higher Education Authority
- 2017 Postgraduate Certificate - Academic Practice (PGCAP) - Salford University
- 2008 – Ph.D Computer Science – Bangor University
- 2003 – BSc. Computer Science (Hons) – Bangor University