Alistair Sutherland's main interests are in statistical pattern recognition. Dr. Sutherland is using techniques from this area to build a system to recognise human hand-gestures from real-time video sequences. He and his collaborator, Dr. Wu Hai, aim to build a system which will recognise at least 1,000 gestures from Irish Sign Language, which is used by the Irish Deaf community. The system is based on multi-scale image analysis and dimensionality reduction. Dr. Sutherland is also using these techniques to map out the pattern space generated by a dataset of hand-written digits. In addition, he is exploring parallels between the theory of thermodynamics and Bayesian Maximum Entropy pattern recognition. This should lead to theoretical results about the optimal trade-offs between speed and accuracy in pattern recognition algorithms.