Dr Kostas Papafitsoros

Kostas Papafitsoros

Lecturer in Mathematical Data Science

School of Mathematical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/maths/profiles/papafitsorosk.html
Centre for Probability, Statistics and Data Science
ORCID Google Scholar

Research

Mathematical Imaging, Inverse Problems, Variational Regularisation Methods, Optimisation, Deep Learning, Environmental conservation

Interests

My main research area is mathematical imaging, in the interface of several areas of applied mathematics, like inverse problems, variational methods, calculus of variations, functional analysis, optimisation, optimal control, numerical analysis and deep learning. I have been particularly involved in the design, analysis and application of nonsmooth energy functionals incorporated in variational regularisation methods tailored for image processing. These functionals are at one hand discontinuity-preserving often stemming from their nonsmoothness, that is, they have the ability to preserve sharp edges in the images and on the other hand, they are adaptive to the specific structure of the given data. I am interested in combining these "classical" methods with modern data-driven and deep learning approaches.

I have a second research direction which is the result of my long-term involvement in environmental conservation with special focus on marine turtles, see the corresponding section of my personal website. I consider several applications of animal photo-identification (identification of individual animals via their unique morphological characteristics e.g. patterns/features), and in the same time consider various ways to enhance and automatise this process via modern imaging techniques. I am also looking at mathematical/statistical aspects of citizen science projects related to wildlife conservation.