Staff profile

Assistant Professor in Visual Computing at Durham University. Stuart's research focus is on Visual Reasoning to understand the layout of visual content from Iconography (e.g. Sketches) to 3D Scene understanding and their implications on methods of interaction. He is currently a co-I on the RePAIR EU FET, DCitizens EU Twinning, and BoSS EU Lighthouse. He was a co-I on the MEMEX RIA EU H2020 project coordinated at IIT for increasing social inclusion with Cultural Heritage. Stuart has previously held Researcher & PostDoc positions at IIT as well as PostDocs at University College London (UCL), and the University of Surrey. Also, at the University of Surrey, Stuart was awarded his PhD in visual information retrieval for sketches. Stuart holds an External Scientist at IIT, Honorary roles at UCL and UCL Digital Humanities, and is an international collaborator of ITI/LARSyS. He also regularly organises Vision for Art (VISART) workshops and Humanities-orientated tutorials and was Program Chair at the British Machine Conference (BMVC) 2021.

For full details see my website: https://stuart-james.com

Conference Paper

• Toso, M., Fiorini, S., James, S., & Del Bue, A. (2025, March). Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Images. Presented at International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), Singapore
• Fernandes, T., Nisi, V., Nunes, N., & James, S. (2024, September). ArtAI4DS: AI Art and Its Empowering Role in Digital Storytelling. Presented at IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing, Manaus, Brazil
• Tsesmelis, T., Palmieri, L., Khoroshiltseva, M., Islam, A., Elkin, G., Itzhak Shahar, O., Scarpellini, G., Fiorini, S., Ohayon, Y., Alali, N., Aslan, S., Morerio, P., Vascon, S., gravina, E., Cristina Napolitano, M., Scarpati, G., zuchtriegel, G., Spühler, A., Fuchs, M. E., James, S., …Del Bue, A. (2024, December). Re-assembling the past: The RePAIR dataset and benchmark for real world 2D and 3D puzzle solving. Presented at Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track, Vancouver, Canada
• Nisi, V., Bala, P., Pessoa, M., James, S., & Nunes, N. (2024, December). Interactive Digital Storytelling Navigating the Inherent Currents of the Diasporic Mind. Presented at International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2024), Barranquilla, Colombia
• Taiana, M., Toso, M., James, S., & Bue, A. D. (2024, March). PRAGO: Differentiable Multi-View Pose Optimization From Objectness Detections*. Presented at 2024 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), Davos, Switzerland
• Bortolon, M., Tsesmelis, T., James, S., Poiesi, F., & Bue, A. D. (2024, May). IFFNeRF: Initialisation Free and Fast 6DoF pose estimation from a single image and a NeRF model. Presented at 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Yokohama, Japan
• Nisi, V., James, S., Bala, P., Del Bue, A., & Jardim Nunes, N. (2023, November). Inclusive Digital Storytelling: Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to re-centre Stories from the Margins. Presented at 16th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2023, Kobe, Japan
• Nisi, V., Bala, P., Cesário, V., James, S., Del Bue, A., & Jardim Nunes, N. (2023, October). "Connected to the people": Social Inclusion & Cohesion in Action through a Cultural Heritage Digital Tool. Presented at ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW)
• Mohamed, H. A., Vascon, S., Hibraj, F., James, S., Pilutti, D., Del Bue, A., & Pelillo, M. (2022, August). Geolocation of Cultural Heritage using Multi-View Knowledge Graph Embedding. Presented at International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2022 International Workshops and Challenge, Montreal, Canada
• Bala, P., James, S., Del Bue, A., & Nisi, V. (2022, December). Writing with (Digital) Scissors: Designing a Text Editing Tool for Assisted Storytelling using Crowd-Generated Content. Presented at Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2022), Santa Cruz, USA
• Talon, D., Del Bue, A., & James, S. (2022, October). GANzzle: Reframing jigsaw puzzle solving as a retrieval task using generative mental images. Presented at IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Bordeaux, France
• Dionísio, M., Nisi, V., Xin, J., Bala, P., James, S., & Jardim Nunes, N. (2021, November). Amnesia in the Atlantic: an AI Driven Serious Game on Marine Biodiversity
• James, S. (2019, September). re-OBJ:Jointly learning the foreground and background for object instance re-identification. Presented at Image Analysis and Processing – ICIAP 2019, Trento, Italy
• Giunchi, D., James, S., & Steed, A. (2028, August). 3D Sketching in Virtual Reality for immersive model search. Presented at Expressive '18: Joint Symposium on Computational Aesthetics and Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling and Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, Victoria, BC, Canada
• Giunchi, D., James, S., & Steed, A. (2018, March). Model Retrieval by 3D Sketching in Immersive Virtual Reality. Presented at IEEE Annual International Symposium Virtual Reality, Reutlingen, Germany
• Dahy Elkhouly, M., James, S., & Del Bue, A. (2018, December). Multi-view Aggregation for Color Naming with Shadow Detection and Removal. Presented at 2018 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Applications and Systems (IPAS), Sophia Antipolis, France
• Gay, P., James, S., & Del Bue, A. (2018, December). Visual Graphs from Motion (VGfM): Scene understanding with object geometry reasoning. Presented at ACCV 2018: Computer Vision – ACCV 2018, Perth, Australia
• James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2016, December). Evolutionary Data Purification for Social Media Classification. Presented at 2016 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Cancun, Mexico
• James, S., Fonseca, M. J., & Collomosse, J. (2014, April). ReEnact: Sketch Based Choreographic Design from Archival Dance Footage. Presented at ICMR '14: International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, Glasgow
• Trujillo-Pisanty, D., Durrant, A., Martindale, S., James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2014, June). Admixed Portrait: Design Intervention to Prompt Reflection on Being Online as a New Parent. Presented at DIS '14: 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2014, November). Interactive Video Asset Retrieval Using Sketched Queries. Presented at CVMP '14: 11th European Conference on Visual Media Production, London
• Gray, C., James, S., Collomosse, J., & Asente, P. (2014, October). A Particle Filtering approach to salient video object localization. Presented at 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Paris, France
• Collomosse, J., James, S., Durrant, A., Trujillo-Pisanty, D., Moncur, W., Orzech, K. M., Martindale, S., & Chantler, M. (2014, December). Enhanced Digital Literacy by Multi-modal Data Mining of the Digital Lifespan. Presented at Fifth Annual Digital Economy All Hands Meeting, London
• Hu, R., James, S., Wang, T., & Collomosse, J. (2013, April). Markov random fields for sketch based video retrieval. Presented at ICMR'13: International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, Dallas, Texas, USA
• Fonseca, M. J., James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2012, September). Skeletons from sketches of dancing poses. Presented at 2012 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2012), Innsbruck, Austria
• Hu, R., James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2012, January). Annotated Free-Hand Sketches for Video Retrieval Using Object Semantics and Motion. Presented at MMM 2012: Advances in Multimedia Modeling, Klagenfurt, Austria

Doctoral Thesis

• James, S. Visual narratives : free-hand sketch for visual search and navigation of video. (Thesis). https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2024611

Journal Article

• Talon, D., Del Bue, A., & James, S. (2025). GANzzle + + : Generative approaches for jigsaw puzzle solving as local to global assignment in latent spatial representations. Pattern Recognition Letters, 187, 35-41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2024.11.010
• Giuliari, F., Scarpellini, G., Fiorini, S., James, S., Morerio, P., Wang, Y., & Del Bue, A. (2024). Positional diffusion: Graph-based diffusion models for set ordering. Pattern Recognition Letters, 186, 272-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2024.10.010
• Mohamed, H. A., Pilutti, D., James, S., Del Bue, A., Pelillo, M., & Vascon, S. (2023). Locality-aware subgraphs for inductive link prediction in knowledge graphs. Pattern Recognition Letters, 167, 90-97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2023.02.004
• Mohamed, H. A., Pilutti, D., James, S., Del Bue, A., Pelillo, M., & Vascon, S. (2023). Locality-aware subgraphs for inductive link prediction in knowledge graphs. Pattern Recognition Letters, 167, 90-97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2023.02.004
• Fiorucci, M., Khoroshiltseva, M., Pontil, M., Traviglia, A., Del Bue, A., & James, S. (2020). Machine Learning for Cultural Heritage: A Survey. Pattern Recognition Letters, 133, 102-108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2020.02.017
• Wang, Y., James, S., Stathopoulou, E. K., Beltrán-González, C., Konishi, Y., & Del Bue, A. (2019). Autonomous 3D reconstruction, mapping and exploration of indoor environments with a robotic arm. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 4(4), 3340-3347. https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2019.2926676
• Moritz, J., James, S., Haines, T. S., Ritschel, T., & Weyrich, T. (2017). Texture Stationarization: Turning Photos into Tilable Textures. Computer Graphics Forum, 36(2), 177-188. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13117
• Orzech, K. M., Moncur, W., Durrant, A., James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2017). Digital photographic practices as expressions of personhood and identity: variations across school leavers and recent retirees. Visual Studies, 32(4), 313-328. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2017.1362959
• James, S., & Collomosse, J. (2011). Annotated Sketches for Intuitive Video Retrieval. Perception, 41(3), https://doi.org/10.1068/ava11