
Dr John Fennell
PhD(Bristol), BSc(Bristol)
Current positions
- Senior Lecturer in Animal Sensing and BiometricsBristol Veterinary School
Contact
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Research interests
I am a Lecturer in Animal Sensing and Biometrics at Bristol Veterinary School. Before being appointed as a lecturer I was an EPSRC Innovation Fellow and principal investigator for a project concerning automatic disease detection and monitoring in calves.
My research interests centre on perception, very broadly defined, which have developed from my undergraduate research project. During my PhD I developed an account of the reward structure in perceptual decision making, based on three dimensions, rather than the single dimension usually considered. More recently my research has been based around deep learning and other mathematical modelling approaches. Currently I am teaching on the Case based learning (CBL) units of the Accelerated Graduate Entry Programme BVSc degree, together with teaching Communications Skills and Business Management in the Professional studies units of the BVSc.
I was awarded my PhD in 2012, which I studied after graduating with a joint honours degree in Psychology and Philosophy, also at Bristol. My third year project investigated natural aesthetics, subjective judgements and eye movements. Following my PhD I was a post doctoral researcher in the School of Experimental Psychology, Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering and School of Biological Sciences, except for a short time working for AIG, a large insurance company, on a project integrating scientific psychological principles into business improvement. This was a valuable experience because it involved working with Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate and father of Behavioural Economics, and Max Bazerman, Harvard professor and leading authority on negotiation. In 2018 I won a prestigious EPSRC Innovation fellowship and moved to the Bristol Veterinary School. Prior to studying at Bristol I spent more than 20 years in the software industry in positions from programmer to Technical Director.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
- Optimising high visibility patterns for bicycle apparel using deep learning- Principal Investigator- Managing organisational unitBristol Veterinary School- Dates- 01/11/2020 to 31/10/2021 
- Automatic thermal and behavioural monitoring for disease detection in foals- Principal Investigator- Role- Co-Investigator - DescriptionFoal pneumonia is a common disease in young horses. The goal of this EPSRC IAA Exploratory Award is to apply technology developed for identifying disease in cattle to automatic detection…- Managing organisational unitBristol Veterinary School- Dates- 01/04/2020 to 31/03/2021 
- Automatic disease detection in racehorses using low-cost thermography and machine learning- Principal Investigator- Role- Co-Investigator - DescriptionEstablished links to studs in Newmarket (UK) and Wiener-Neustadt (Austria), which lead into an EPSRC IAA Exploratory Award to detect and monitor foal pneumonia.- Managing organisational unitBristol Veterinary School- Dates- 01/07/2019 to 31/03/2020 
- Concealing 3D objects- Principal Investigator- Role- Co-Investigator - Managing organisational unitSchool of Biological Sciences- Dates- 08/06/2019 to 31/12/2022 
- Evolving animal camouflage using Generative Adversarial Networks to simulate antagonistic evolutionary pressures in nature- Principal Investigator- Role- Co-Principal Investigator - DescriptionNVIDIA GPU Grant Program- Managing organisational unitBristol Veterinary School- Dates- 01/01/2019 
Thesis supervisions
- Animal Emotion and Welfare- Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
29/08/2022Automatic thermal monitoring of calves using low-cost infrared thermography
Precision Livestock Farming '22
Testing the Utility of Gaussian Mixture Models in Parataxonomic Classification of Fossil Eggs
PalArch's Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology
The Camouflage Machine
Evolution
CamoGAN
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Cognitive bias in the clinical decision making of doctors
Future Healthcare Journal
Thesis
- An expected utility theory that matches human performance- Supervisors- Award date- 01/01/2012 




