Alexei completed his PhD studies in information retrieval in 2007, at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, in the Multimedia and Information Systems Group. He was supervised by Dr. Stefan Rüger.

Before joining Imperial he was an undergraduate at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, and before that he was at Bedales of which he has very fond memories.

He works on statistical models for automatic image annotation. Using the outcomes of his research he has built a prototype image search engine called Behold on which he now works full time. Motivated by his PhD studies he has developed strong interests in practical models for noisy, real-world data and low-level computer vision techniques.