Philip Torr

Torr was privately educated at Manchester Grammar School from 1977 to 1983.^[8] He graduated with a first class degree in pure mathematics from the University of Southampton in 1987,^[2] and then completed a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree at the University of Oxford where his research was supervised by David W. Murray.^[4][9][10]

After his DPhil, Torr worked for another three years at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow with Andrew Zisserman in the visual geometry group.^[11]

Torr left Oxford to work for six years as a research scientist for Microsoft Research, first in Redmond, Washington, US, in the Vision Technology Group, then in Cambridge, UK, founding the vision side of the Machine Learning and Perception Group.^[7] He was subsequently appointed a Professor in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Oxford Brookes University. During this time he worked closely with Sony, his group is credited for computer vision on the title of the Wonderbook Book of Spells,^[12][13] which sold over 660,000 units. Torr also worked closely with Oxford-based company Vicon on markerless motion capture, this work was awarded best knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) of the year in 2009.^[14] In 2013, Torr returned to University of Oxford as a full professor where he established the Torr Vision group.^[15]

In 2016 he founded Oxsight^[1][16][17] a social enterprise^{[citation needed]} to help people with visual impairment use computer vision techniques to enhance their life. In 2019 he founded AIstetic a company to do 3D reconstruction.^[18] Torr has served as chief scientific advisor for Five AI^[19] from their formation in 2016 through their journey to acquisition in 2022 by Bosch Group.^[20] Torr became a Chief Scientific Advisor for DreamTech, Exient established by ex-members of the Torr Vision Group.^{[citation needed]}

In 2024, he joined CAMEL-AI as an advisor, contributing to the first large language model (LLM) multi-agent framework and an open-source community dedicated to discovering the scaling law of agents.^[21]

Torr has served as chair for conferences in his field including ECCV 2008,^[22] ICCV 2013,^[23] CVPR 2019^[24] and ICCV 2029.^[25] He was also invited as a speaker of Starmus Festival in 2024.^{[citation needed]}

More recently, Torr's group has branched out from computer vision into the fields of AI safety and AI scientist research.^[3][15][26] Torr is a fellow of the Future of Life Institute,^[27] as well as distinguished research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford.^[28] He is interested in ensuring that its benefits are distributed equally to all of society.^[29]

Torr is the son of Harriet Torr.^[2]