Wallace Peaslee

Hello and welcome to my webpage!

I am an applied mathematics PhD student in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge as a member of Jesus College. I currently work in the intersection of image analysis and cultural heritage under the supervision of Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb as part of Cambridge Image Analysis. I began my PhD in 2022 and am funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and AI for Cultural Heritage Hub.

I primarily develop bespoke mathematical methods and models, using both classical approaches and AI/ML, specialized to support the investigation of historical artworks and manuscripts. This typically involves working collaboratively with heritage scientists, art historians, and conservators and working with scientific imaging modalities such as multi/hyperspectral imaging, MA-XRF, and high-resolution photography. We often aim to visualize or reconstruct particular features in a painting or manuscript, whether preliminary artist sketches or degraded writing or music notation. The projects I work on thematically relate to multi-modal image analysis, domain generalization, and visualization.

For instance, I am part of the AI for cultural heritage hub (ArCH) and Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)-funded project Non-invasive imaging and machine learning techniques for the reconstruction of degraded historical sheet music with Anna Breger. I completed a secondment at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands) hosted by Tristan van Leeuwen and Francien Bossema in the Computational Imaging Group, working in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum.

Before my PhD, I was an undergraduate majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science at Duke University. There, I also explored projects in pure mathematics through an undergraduate senior thesis related to combinatorics and cohomology with Professor Joseph Rabinoff and a project that started through Budapest Semesters in Mathematics with Dr. Attila Sali and Jun Yan.

While at Duke I was very fortunate to begin working in applied mathematics through projects supervised by Professor Ingrid Daubechies (along with Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and Barak Sober) related to image processing and artworks in collaboration with the ARTICT research group and the National Gallery in London. It was this wonderful experience that inspired me to pursue the intersection of mathematics and art investigation, leading to my PhD studies and current research focus.