Dr Tilo Burghardt is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focus is on applied computer vision. He contributed to establishing Visual Animal Biometrics as an emerging cross-discipline routed in computer vision and ecology. He pioneered the study of visual object recognition in the ecological context of monitoring natural environments (working with Barham, Cuthill, Campbell, Thomas, Calic and Sherley). His research interests include the robust visual detection, identification and tracking of animals and their behaviour in unconstrained environments in order to support ecological research, behavioural biology, species conservation as well as related domains such as eco-tourism and wildlife documentation.
 
Outreach and Community. His research has reached out to the general public via the international press, science exhibitions and national television (BBC). His work contributed to the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2008/2009 with Chris Bishop and the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2008. He routinely contributes to both the Futuretech and Nuffield outreach programmes to schools. He participated in the 'Best of Bristol Lectures 2013', and has been local organizer of the International Penguin Conference 2013 and the European Conference of Machine Learning 2012. He is a Chair of the British Machine Vision Conference 2013. 
 
Current Research. He currently works with international partners at the intersection between computer vision and the biological and physical sciences, including computational phenomics and physically uncloneable functions (PUFs). Specific applications of his work have led to the use of computer vision for monitoring endangered animal populations in their natural habitat, and visual methods to enable the secure authentication of plastic tags.
 
Academic Background. Burghardt graduated with Distinction in Media Computing (Bakk. Medien-Inf.) at Dresden University of Technology (Germany). Subsequently, he received a Master of Science degree in Advanced Computing (MSc) and a Doctorate in Computer Vision (PhD) from the University of Bristol (UK). After initial post-doctoral work at the School of Physics (2009), he was awarded an Academic Fellowship of the Research Councils UK (2009-2012) and became a Lecturer (2012-present) at the Dept of Computer Science, being associated to both the Visual Information Laboratory and the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Bristol. Burghardt is a member of the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) and the German Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).