Dr. Neil James Cooke was awarded a BEng (Hons) in Electronic Engineering from UMIST (Manchester) and an M.Sc. with distinction and the PhD from the University of Birmingham.

He holds a Post-Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCert ILT) and has 8 years experience in teaching/developing undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Multimodal Signal Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Interactive 3D simulations, Software Engineering and Project Management and Medical Informatics. Prior to academia, he has 10 years industrial experience as a Industrial Software Engineer designing real-time embedded systems, and as a Communications Network Engineer.

His PhD published in 2007 “Gaze Contingent Automatic Speech Recognition” focussed on using information from a person's gaze behaviour to improve speech recognition systems by developing novel algorithms for adapting statistical language models. This spurred publications in IET Signal Processing journal and several conferences. In 2010-2012 he undertook research as part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) sponsored Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre (HFDTC) programme addressing 3D Virtual Environment and Games-Based training technologies; see research pages for more detail and links to publications.

Presently he supervises several PhD students and has a specific interest in Gaze Tracking / Multimodal Signal Processing, Speech Recognition / Language Modelling, and Interactive 3D / AI in Education.