The Lecturers
Ales Leonardis ( http://www.fri.uni-lj.si/en/personnel/29/oseba.html )Ales Leonardis is a full professor and the head of the Visual Cognitive Systems Laboratory with the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana . He is also an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology. From 1988 to 1991, he was a visiting researcher in the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania . From 1995 to 1997, he was a postdoctoral associate at the PRIP, Vienna University of Technology. He was also a visiting researcher and a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich and at the Technische Fakultat der Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat in Erlangen , respectively.
His research interests include robust and adaptive methods for computer vision, object and scene recognition, learning, and 3D object modeling. He is an author or coauthor of more than 130 papers published in journals and conferences and he coauthored the book Segmentation and Recovery of Superquadrics (Kluwer, 2000). He is an Editorial Board Member of Pattern Recognition and an Editor of the Springer Book Series Computational Imaging and Vision. He has served on the program committees of major computer vision and pattern recognition conferences. He was also a program cochair of the European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2006. He has received several awards. In 2002, he coauthored a paper, “Multiple Eigenspaces,” which won the 29th Annual Pattern Recognition Society award. In 2004, he was awarded a prestigious national Award for scientific achievements. He is a fellow of the IAPR and a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society.
Bastian Leibe ( http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~bleibe/)
Bastian Leibe obtained a MS degree in computer science from Georgia
Institute of Technology in 1999 and a Diplom degree in computer science from the University of Stuttgart in 2001. From 2001 to 2004, he pursued his doctoral studies at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Bernt Schiele. He received his PhD degree from ETH Zurich in 2004 with his dissertation on "Interleaved Object Categorization and Segmentation", for which he was awarded the ETH Medal. After a one-year post-doc at University of Darmstadt in 2005, he joined the BIWI computer vision group at ETH Zurich in 2006, where he currently holds a post-doc position.
Bastian's main research interests include
object recognition, categorization, and detection; top-down segmentation; and lately also tracking. Over the years, he received several awards for his research work, including the DAGM Main Prize in 2004 and the CVPR Best Video Award in 2006. He serves as a program committee member for ICCV, ECCV, and CVPR and is routinely reviewing for IEEE Trans. PAMI, IJCV, and CVIU.
Benjamin Kuipers ( http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuipers/ )
Benjamin Kuipers holds an endowed Professorship in Computer Sciences
at the University of Texas at Austin . He investigates the representation of commonsense and expert knowledge, with particular emphasis on the effective use of incomplete knowledge. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College , and his Ph.D. from MIT. He has held research or faculty appointments at MIT, Tufts University , and the University of Texas .
His research accomplishments include developing the TOUR model of spatial knowledge in the cognitive map, the QSIM algorithm for qualitative simulation, the Algernon system for
knowledge representation, and the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy model of
knowledge for robot exploration and mapping. He has served as Department Chairman, and is a Fellow of AAAI and IEEE.
Bernt Schiele ( http://www.mis.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/schiele)
Bernt Schiele is Full Professor of Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Technology since April 2004. He studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He worked on his master thesis in the field of robotics in Grenoble , France , where he also obtained the "diplome d'etudes approfondies d'informatique". In 1994 he worked in the field of multi-modal human-computer interfaces at Carnegie Mellon University , Pittsburgh , PA , USA in the group of
Alex Waibel. In 1997 he obtained his PhD from INP Grenoble, France under the supervision of Prof. James L. Crowley in the field of computer vision. The title of his thesis was "Object Recognition using Multidimensional Receptive Field Histograms". Between 1997 and 2000 he was postdoctoral associate and Visiting Assistant Professor with the group of Prof. Alex Pentland at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge , MA , USA . From 1999
until 2004 he was Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technoly in Zurich (ETH Zurich ).
His main research interests are in computer vision, perceptual computing, statistical learning methods, wearable computers, and integration of multi-modal sensor data. He is particularly interested in developing methods which work under real-world conditions.
Craig Boutilier ( http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cebly/)
Craig Boutilier is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1992, and worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia from 1991 until his return to Toronto in 1999. Boutilier was a consulting professor at Stanford University from 1998-2000, and has served on the Technical Advisory Board of CombineNet, Inc. since 2001.
Boutilier's research interests have spanned a wide range of topics, from knowledge representation, belief revision, default reasoning, and philosophical.
Frederic Kaplan ( http://www.fkaplan.com )
Frederic Kaplan is a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland . He graduated as an engineer of the Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Télécommunications in Paris and received a PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University Paris VI. Between 1997 and 2006, he worked at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris on the design of novel approaches to robot learning and on the emergence of cultural systems among
machines.
He published two books and more than 50 articles in scientific journals, edited books and peer-reviewed proceedings in the fields of epigenetic robotics, complex systems, computational neurosciences, ethology and evolutionary linguistics.
Hynek Hermansky ( http://people.idiap.ch/hynek)
Hynek Hermansky works at the IDIAP Martigny, Switzerland , and is a Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland . He has been working in speech processing for over 30 years, previously as a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo , a Research Engineer at Panasonic Technologies in Santa Barbara , California , a Senior Member of Research Staff at U S WEST Advanced Technologies, and a Professor and Director of the Center for Information Processing at OHSU Portland, Oregon.
He is a Fellow of IEEE for “Invention and development of perceptually-based speech processing methods”, a Member of the Editorial Board of Speech Communication and of Phonetica, holds 5 US patents and authored or co-authored over 130 papers in reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He holds Dr.Eng. Degree from the University of Tokyo , and Dipl. Ing. Degree from Brno University of Technology , Czech Republic . His main research interests are in acoustic processing for speech recognition.
Jörn Anemüller ( http://www.anemueller.de/)
Jörn Anemüller studied at the University of London, England, and the University of Oldenburg, Germany, where he obtained the M.Sc. in Information Processing and the Ph.D. in Physics, respectively. He did a post-doctorate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and University of California San Diego in the field of neurobiological data analysis and is presently leading the speech processing effort within the Medical Physics Section at the University of Oldenburg .
Matthias Scheutz ( http://www.nd.edu/~mscheutz/ )
Matthias Scheutz received the M.Sc.E. degrees in formal logic and computer engineering from the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology, respectively, in 1993, and the M.A. and Ph.D. of philosophy in philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1989 and 1995 respectively. He also received the joint Ph.D. in cognitive science and computer science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1999. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory.
He has over 90 peer-reviewed publications in artificial intelligence, artificial life, agent-based computing, cognitive modeling, foundations of cognitive science, and robotics.
His current research interests include agent-based modeling, cognitive modeling, complex cognitive and affective robots for human-robot interaction, computational models of human language processing in mono- and bilinguals, cognitive architectures, distributed agent architectures, and interactions between affect and cognition.
Rufin Vogels (Lab Neuro- en Psychofysiologie, KULeuven Medical School )has worked on the coding of object properties by single neurons in the macaque inferior temporal cortex and the neural mechanisms of visual categorization. He employs electrophysiological and behavioral techniques in rhesus monkeys to answer his research questions and has collaborated in several functional imaging studies in monkeys and humans as well.
His current interests are neural mechanisms of perceptual learning and categorization, neural adaptation and coding of visual actions.
Tinne Tuytelaars ( http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~tuytelaa/)
Tinne Tuytelaars received the MS degree in electrotechnical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1996. Since then, she has been working as a researcher in the computer vision group VISICS at that same university, which led to the PhD degree in 2000, for her work on “Local Invariant Features for Registration and Recognition”. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO).
Her main research interests are object recognition, wide baseline matching, and database retrieval, all based upon the concept of local invariant features. She serves as a program committee member for several of the most important computer vision conferences worldwide, and has over forty peer-reviewed publications.
Tomas Pajdla ( http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/~pajdla/)
Tomas Pajdla received the MSc and PhD degrees from the Czech Technical University in Prague. He coauthored works that introduced epipolar geometry of panoramic cameras, investigated the use of panoramic images for robot localization, contributed to studies of panoramic mosaics, and studied non-central cameras and generalized epipolar geometries. He participated on developing an automatic approach to wide baseline image stereo matching and reconstruction of 3D scenes from many images. He coauthored works awarded the best paper prize at OAGM98 and BMVC02 and co-supervised the CMP team that won the second place for their 3D location estimation from uncalibrated 2D images in the ICCV 2005 Vision Contest.