Principal Investigators
Prof. Richard Bowden
Lead Principal Investigator · CVSSP, University of Surrey
Richard Bowden is Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, where he has worked for over two decades on sign language recognition and production. He is a leading authority on human motion analysis, gesture recognition, and vision-language modelling for sign languages. His group has published extensively at top venues including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, and ACL, and he leads the CogVis Laboratory.
Prof. Andrew Zisserman
Principal Investigator · VGG, University of Oxford
Andrew Zisserman is Professor of Computer Vision Engineering at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Visual Geometry Group (VGG). He is one of the most highly cited researchers in computer vision, known for foundational contributions to visual recognition, 3D reconstruction, and large-scale video understanding. Within SignGPT he leads the large-scale pre-training and model scaling workstreams.
Prof. Kearsy Cormier
Principal Investigator · DCAL, University College London
Kearsy Cormier is Professor of Sign Language Linguistics at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), UCL. Her research focuses on the grammar of BSL, with particular expertise in classifier/depicting constructions, discourse structure, and the cross-linguistic study of sign languages. Within SignGPT she leads the linguistics integration workstream and co-leads dataset annotation.
Prof. Bencie Woll
Principal Investigator · DCAL, University College London
Bencie Woll is Emeritus Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies at DCAL, UCL, and one of the world's foremost authorities on BSL and Deaf communities. She has conducted landmark longitudinal studies of BSL acquisition, change, and endangerment, and advises government and public bodies on BSL policy. Within SignGPT she provides linguistic and community oversight.