Professor Ruzena Bajcsy

University of California, Berkeley

December 16, 2008

Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland

MIT Media Lab

About the speaker: Professor Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational media. Sandy's focus is the development of human-centered technology, and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world. He directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and the EPROM entrepreneurship program in Africa. He is among the most-cited computer scientists in the world, and in 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.

December 17, 2007

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Abstract: The most time-consuming task of producing a map – after data collection – is that of labeling the point, line, and area features depicted on a map. It is a task that skilled cartographers have performed for centuries but one that until recently had defied all attempts at automation – very much in the same way that other artistic tasks, such as the writing of poetry or composing music have been beyond computers’ ability. Cartographers consider themselves to be artists, and indeed the quality with which a map’s features are labeled determines the effectiveness with which the map communicates spatial relationships to its viewer. This talk describes a dedicated effort, started some 25 years ago, to solve this problem and allow the automated labeling of a map’s features today with results that are indistinguishable from those achieved by skilled cartographers.

About the speaker: Herbert Freeman received his B.S.E.E. degree from Union College, Schenectady, NY (1946) and his Masters (1948) and Dr.Eng.Sc. degrees from Columbia University (1956). From 1948 through 1960 he was employed by the Sperry Corporation, where he designed the company's first digital computer, the SPEEDAC, which was completed in 1953. In 1960 he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at New York University, becoming chairman of the department in 1968. From 1975 through 1985, he was professor and director of the Image Processing Laboratory in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY. Since 1985 he has been State of New Jersey Professor of Computer Engineering at Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ, where he also served as the first Director of the Center for Computer Aids for Industrial Productivity, a university-industry-government collaborative research center, from 1985 through 1990. Among some of his significant technical contributions are the invention of the chain code for line-drawing representation (commonly known as the "Freeman chain code"), the concept of characteristic views in machine vision, and the development of high-quality automated cartographic text placement technology. He is a past Chairman of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, a founding member and past President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and served as program chairman of the 1974 World Computer Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a past NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of IAPR, and a Fellow the ACM. In 1994, the International Association for Pattern Recognition awarded him its K.S.Fu prize "for his pioneering contributions to the representation and analysis of line drawing data," and in 1996, the University of Pavia, Italy, honored him with its Medaglia Teresiana for his contributions to the field of pattern recognition. He has held visiting positions at MIT., The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the University of Pisa, Stanford University, and the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is the author or editor of seven books and has published more than 100 articles in the technical literature. In 1997 he founded a company, MapText, devoted to the automated labeling of map features. The company was sold in 2005 and he has been in retirement since that time.