Takeo Kanade

Takeo Kanade's contributions to computer vision and robotics balance fundamental theoretical insights with practical, real-world applications. His research covers a remarkable range of areas, including motion detection and analysis, direct drive manipulators, face detection and analysis, three dimensional shape recovery from stereo vision and from motion analysis, video surveillance and monitoring, and many other topics. His results are based on keen algorithmic insights, supported by sound mathematical and physical principles, and rigorous implementation and evaluation of deployed systems. Such applications include medical robots for surgical assistance, "virtualized reality" systems for capturing and visualizing three-dimensional scenes, many modern graphical effects in video, and autonomous vehicles and helicopters. Professor Kanade's work is interdisciplinary throughout, drawing on theories and methods from perception, mechanics, kinematics, mathematics, and core computer science.

Professor Kanade has played a major leadership role within the field of vision and robotics. From 1991 to 2001, he was the Director of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon. Under his leadership, the Institute doubled its activities and grew into one of the largest and best-known robotics organizations in the world. He also founded the Robotics Ph.D. Program at Carnegie Mellon in 1989, which has produced a new generation of roboticists who themselves are now leaders in academia, government, and industry throughout the world. In 2001, he founded the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo, which is dedicated to observing and measuring human functions, developing computer models of these functions, and applying them to the design of human-centered systems. Finally, in July 2006, Professor Kanade established a new NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology Center, jointly with University of Pittsburgh's Rehabilitation Science and Technology Department. All of these organizations bring together researchers from different fields, and serve to bridge interdisciplinary boundaries between them.