Dr Leonardo Impett is a University Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and convenor of the MPhil in Digital Humanities. He was previously Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Durham University. Leonardo has a background in information engineering and machine learning, having worked or studied at the Cambridge Machine Learning Lab, the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Rainbow Group, and Microsoft Research Cairo. His Ph.D., with Sabine Süsstrunk and Franco Moretti at EPFL, was on the use of computer vision for the “distant reading” of the history of art. In 2018 Leonardo was a DH fellow at Villa I Tatti – the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, from 2018-2020 he was Scientific Assistant, then Scientist, at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. Alongside his research in digital art history, he frequently works with machine learning in arts and culture, including for the Liverpool Biennial, the Royal Opera House, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Leo is interested in supervising doctoral projects in the following areas: computational and quantitative approaches to art and cultural history; critical computer vision, critical AI studies; historical/critical/cultural studies of training dataset and neural architectures; AI in image generation, contemporary art, and curation.
