Dr Neil Cooke PhD MSc(Distinction) BEng(Hons)

Dr Neil Cooke

Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering
Associate Professor
Senior Academic Tutor
Deputy Director of the School of Engineering Teaching and Learning Centre

Contact details

Telephone
+44 (0) 121 414 3495
Fax
+44 (0) 121 414 4291
Email
n.j.cooke@bham.ac.uk
View my research portal
Address
School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr Neil Cooke is a Associate Professor, Deputy Director of the School of Engineering Teaching and Learning Centre, and a member of the Board of Directors for the European Society of Engineering Educators (SEFI).

Qualifications

• PGCert Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 
• PhD in Engineering
• MSc with Distinction in Communications, Computers and Human Centred Systems, University of Birmingham
• BEng (hons) Electronic Engineering, UMIST

Biography

Neil has vast experience from research and teaching activities covering systems and data engineering, multimodal physiological signal processing, artificial intelligence, affective computing, visualisation and virtual reality, medical informatics; educational technologies and engineering education. His work spans several industrial domains including defence training and simulation; medical, telecommunications infrastructure and education. He has designed, developed and delivered 100+ credits of different innovative teaching materials at all degree levels, supervised upwards of 70 project students, contributed to higher education teacher training, conducts Engineering education research, lead designing and implementing laboratory curriculum change initiatives across STEM faculties, and has extensive international student recruitment and outreach experience. He has co-authored 27 publications in peer review conferences and journals.

Teaching

Current (2018/19):

  • Integrated Design Project (20 credits)
  • Multidisciplinary Software and Systems / Python for Engineers (10 Credits)

Previous:

  • Multimodal Interaction and Signal Processing
  • Interactive 3D for Visualisation and Virtual Reality
  • Project management and professional practice
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software engineering
  • Medical information systems

Postgraduate supervision

I am currently recruiting PhD students for Engineering Education projects. Please see the school engineering teaching and learning centre page.

Research

  • (2016) Engineering Education Research through the School of Engineering Teaching and Learning Centre.
  • (2014-2017) CI on the collaborative EU “Scalable Proactive Event-Driven Decision-making” (SPEEDD) project concerning making forecasting decisions in real time based on large amounts of Big Data in order to improve the quality of life and prevent environment and economical damage.
  • (2012-13) External PhD Supervisory advisor for PhD at University of Worcester
  • (2010-2012) funded as part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) sponsored Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFDTC) programme.
  • Periodic reviewer for ACM Trans. Interactive Intelligent Systems (2010-), IET Jnl. Signal Processing Journal (2008-), Interspeech conf. (2007-), IEEE Int. conf. Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (2008-)
  • Periodic reviewer for ACM Trans. Interactive Intelligent Systems (2010-), IET Jnl. Signal Processing Journal (2008-), Interspeech conf. (2007-), IEEE Int. conf. Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (2008-).
  • (2002-2005) EPSRC funded PhD studentship.

Research Gate public profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Neil_Cooke

Publications

  • Cooke, N.,  Theofanous, M., Saadat, M,, Hawwash, K. “Embedding the SDGs into Interdisciplinary Engineering PBL: A Case Study: Structural Mechatronics Integrated Design Project” Proceedings of European Engineering Education Conference (SEFI 2018). 2018
  • Alhargan, Ashwaq, Neil Cooke, and Tareq Binjammaz. "Multimodal affect recognition in an interactive gaming environment using eye tracking and speech signals." Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. ACM, 2017.
  • Alhargan, Ashwaq, Neil Cooke, and Tareq Binjammaz. "Affect recognition in an interactive gaming environment using eye tracking." Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017 Seventh International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.
  • Cooke, N., Robbins, P,. Shannon, I, Lodge, J., Hawwash, K.  “Recommendations for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks in Undergraduate Engineering Faculty” Proceedings of European Engineering Education Conference (SEFI 2017). 2017
  • Starke, Sandra D., Baber, Howes, Cooke et al. "Workflows and individual differences during visually guided routine tasks in a road traffic management control room." Applied ergonomics 61 (2017): 79-89.
  • Moghimi, M., Stone, R., Rotshtein, P., & Cooke, N. (2016). Influencing human affective responses to dynamic virtual environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 25(2), 81-107.
  • Cooke, N, P. Robbins, M. Grove, J. Binner, J. Green, S. Quigley “Remolding the STEM graduate for 2020: The STEM Collaborative Teaching Laboratory". Proceedings of European Engineering Education Conference (SEFI 2016). 2016
  • Robert Stone, Timothy Snell, Neil Cooke, An inexpensive underwater mine countermeasures simulator with real-time 3D after action review, Defence Technology, Available online 11 July 2016, ISSN 2214-9147, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dt.2016.06.001.
  • M. R. H. Samadi, Z. Zakeri and N. Cooke, "VOG-enhanced ICA for removing blink and eye-movement artefacts from EEG," 2016 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2016, pp. 603-606. doi: 10.1109/BHI.2016.7455970
  • Z. Zakeri, M. R. H. Samadi, N. Cooke and P. Jancovic, "Automatic ERP classification in EEG recordings from task-related independent components," 2016 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2016, pp. 288-291. doi: 10.1109/BHI.2016.7455891
  • Starke, Sandra D, Natan Sorin Morar, Chris Baber, Neil Cooke, Xiuli Chen, Andrew Howes. "Scan pattern similarity in repetitive user interface examination." European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM), Vienna, Austria, August 2015
  • Ch'ng, Eugene, and Neil Cooke. "User Study on 3D Multitouch interaction (3DMi) and Gaze on Surface Computing." HCI International August 2015.
  • Starke, Sandra, Neil Cooke, Andrew Howes, Natan Morar and Chris Baber. "Visual Sampling in A Road Traffic Management Control Room Task". Contemporary Ergonomics & Human Factors 2015.
  • Samadi, Mohammad Reza Haji, and Neil Cooke. "EEG signal processing for eye tracking." Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2014 Proceedings of the 22nd European. IEEE, 2014.
  • Samadi, Mohammad Reza Haji, and Neil Cooke. "VOG-enhanced ICA for SSVEP response detection from consumer-grade EEG." Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2014 Proceedings of the 22nd European. IEEE, 2014.
  • Cooke, Neil, Ao Shen and Martin Russell. "Exploiting a 'Gaze-Lombard Effect' to improve ASR performance in acoustically noisy settings". IEEE Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2014).
  •  Samadi, Mohammad Reza Haji, and Neil Cooke. "A novel approach for adaptive EEG artefact rejection and EEG gaze estimation." HCI International 2013-Posters’ Extended Abstracts. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. 603-607.
  •  Cooke, Neil, and Robert Stone. "RORSIM: a warship collision avoidance 3D simulation designed to complement existing Junior Warfare Officer training". Virtual Reality 17/3 pp 169-179.(2013)
  •  Shen, Ao, Neil Cooke and Martin Russell. "Selective use of gaze information to improve ASR performace in noisy environments by cache-based class language model adaptation". Interspeech (2013).
  • Cooke, Neil J. and Ao Shen. "Mutual Information as a variable to differentiate the roles of gaze in the multimodal interface". Presented at the Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction at the 2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces ACM (2010).
  • Cooke, Neil J., and Martin J. Russell. "Cache-based language model adaptation using visual attention for ASR in meeting scenarios." Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Multimodal interfaces. ACM, (2009).
  • Cooke, Neil James, and Martin Russell. "Gaze-contingent automatic speech recognition." Signal Processing, IET 2.4 (2008): 369-380.
  • Cooke, Neil, and Martin Russell. "Gaze-contingent asr for spontaneous, conversational speech: an evaluation." Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2008. ICASSP 2008. IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2008.
  • Bull, Susan, Neil Cooke, and Andrew Mabbott. "Visual attention in open learner model presentations: An eye-tracking investigation." User Modeling 2007 (2007): 177-186.
  • Cooke, Neil. "Gaze-contingent Automatic Speech Recognition". PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham,2007.
  • Cooke, Neil, and Martin Russell. "Using the focus of visual attention to improve spontaneous speech recognition." In Proc. European Conf. Speech Communication and Technology (INTERSPEECH). ISCA, pp. 1213-1216. 2005.
  • Cooke, Neil, Martin Russell, and Antje Meyer. "evaluation of hidden Markov models robustness in uncovering focus of visual attention from noisy eye-tracker data."Proceedings of the 2004 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications. ACM, 2004. On 3D virtual environments

View all publications in research portal