Dr. Richard Bowden is Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer at Signapse AI, a University of Surrey spinout using generative AI to deliver photo-realistic sign language translation for the global Deaf community.

Richard earned a BSc in Computer Science from the University of London, an MSc with distinction from the University of Leeds, and a PhD in Computer Vision from Brunel University, for which he received the Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize for the best UK thesis in computer vision.

Richard is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and a Senior Member of the IEEE, recognised for his contributions to sign language, gesture, and activity recognition in computer vision.

As Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the University of Surrey, Richard has led the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) for over 20 years, pioneering research that directly underpins Signapse's core technology.

Signapse has raised over £2M in seed funding, generates 5,000 BSL train announcements daily across the UK, and has secured a Google.org AI for the Global Goals Grant of USD 1.5M to advance real-time sign language translation.