Research
Alongside the artworks I build systems that collect, verify and interpret images of the world: where a picture was taken, when, by whom, and whether independent sources agree. Much of this work is proprietary, so this page sets out the areas I work in and points to what is public.
Co-founder · Research & development
Collective Memory
A distributed, contributor-led archive of geolocated observation: more than 18 million clips from 174 countries, including sustained documentation in Gaza and Ukraine. I lead research and development, from field capture to ethically sourced datasets with contributor remuneration.
Read more →Areas
- Verification and provenance
- Capture-time metadata, integrity checks, confirming observations against independent footage of the same place; tracing how images travel and are reused online.
- Collective Memory Wiki Culverts
- Geolocation and 3D reconstruction
- Placing imagery from pixels when GPS is missing or wrong; structure-from-motion and photogrammetry from uncalibrated and archival photographs.
- Collective Memory Archival Photogrammetry
- Satellite and geospatial data
- Satellite and generative remote-sensing imagery, OpenStreetMap tiles, Google Earth Engine, LiDAR, GeoJSON, and digitized historical maps.
- Satellite Image Exchange Meandering Rio Commons LiDaR ShoreLINE DEM film
- Computer vision on open sources
- Detection and tracking on public livestreams; face and licence-plate de-identification across photo and video at dataset scale.
- Bovine Weather Model Collective Memory
- AI, misinformation and on-chain data
- LLM assistants reasoning over networks of news sources; how AI inherits bias from its sources; smart contracts, subgraph indexing and brute-force key search on Ethereum.
- News Currencies Searching for Null
- Fieldwork and ethnography
- Field surveys, interviews and documentation — from 1,200 culverts in Vermont to the US–Mexico border and COP26; capture tools designed for contributors documenting their own surroundings.
- Collective Memory Wiki Culverts Meandering Rio Commons Into the Oceanic
- Sound and sensing
- Field recording, sound design and original scores; sensor-driven and robotic systems; listening as a way of documenting a place alongside the image.
- The Cavalry DEM film Cyano-Bot
- Data economics and ethical ground truth
- Consent, provenance and contributor remuneration in the production of training data; markets, tokens and prediction as objects of critique.
- Collective Memory Bovine Weather Model Searching for Null
Public data and code
- cm-gaza Verified in-the-wild phone footage with capture metadata, pixel-match graph and SfM example · Hugging Face
- US Malls Indoor walks with camera poses, metric depth and a relocalization benchmark · Hugging Face
- Rio Meander GeoJSON Open historical river-channel data · GitHub Pages
- Critical Data Framework Blockchain and AI data framework · GitHub
- dadasSubGraph Custom subgraph for on-chain analytics · GitHub
- 0 Searching for Null — key search and visualization · GitHub
Teaching
- AI & Design China Academy of Art, Visiting Professor Fellow, 2023
- GIS & Mapping Ethics Ohio State University, 2022
- Web3 Theory & Technologies Shanghai University, 2022
- Ethnography workshop, COP26 Glasgow School of Art, 2021