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For an overview of my research, check out our vision lab projects page.

I work in computer vision, the area of computer science concerned with automatically inferring semantic meaning from images -- teaching computers to "see." More generally, I am interested in problems that involve analyzing and modeling large amounts of uncertain data, like mining data from social networking websites.

I'm a full Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, where I direct the IU Computer Vision Lab. I'm on the faculty of the Computer Science, Informatics, Cognitive Science, and Data Science programs, and I'm adjunct in the Department of Statistics. My work has been funded by grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation (including through a CAREER award), Facebook, Google, Kodak, the Department of Defense, and Indiana University.

Before joining IU, I was a graduate student and postdoc in Computer Science at Cornell University. I worked with Professor Dan Huttenlocher on statistical part-based object recognition algorithms, and with Professor Jon Kleinberg on modeling and mining data from online social networks. I completed the Ph.D. degree in August 2008.

Before Cornell, I spent two years in the research labs of Eastman Kodak Company. There I worked mostly on image understanding and enhancement algorithms for both consumer and medical images.

As an undergraduate and Masters student at Penn State University, I worked with Professor Rangachar Kasturi on content-based video indexing, and specifically on detecting, tracking and recognizing text in video (both captions and text appearing naturally in a scene).

Here are just a few recent publications; please see my lab's publications and projects pages, any my Google Scholar profile, for a complete list.

Current:

• (Not teaching in Fall 2023)

Past:

• CSCI B551, Elements of Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021)
• CSCI B657, Computer Vision (Fall 2010, Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023)
• Info I609/I709, Seminar in Intelligent and Interactive Systems (Spring 2019)
• CSCI B490/B659, Image processing and recognition (Spring 2015)
• Info I210, Information Infrastructure I (Fall 2014)
• Info I399, Research Methods for Undergraduates (Fall 2013)
• CSCI B553, Probabilistic Approaches to Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2013)
• Info I427, Search Informatics (Fall 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015)
• Info 2950, Mathematical Methods for Information Science, Fall 2008 (at Cornell)
• CS 113, Introduction to C, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 (at Cornell)
• CS 211, Algorithms and Data Structures in Java, Summer 2007 (at Cornell)
• T.A. for CS 664, Computer Vision, Fall 2003 (at Cornell)
• CSE 275, Digital Design Lab, Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 (at Penn State)

For a complete list of current and former graduate and undergraduate students, please see our lab web page.

• Zehua Zhang, 2023, now at Facebook
• Bardia Doosti, 2021, now at Google
• Eman Hassan, 2021, now at Blackmagic Design
• Mingze Xu, 2020, now at Cruize
• Chenyou Fan, 2019, now Associate Professor at South China Normal University
• Jangwon Lee, 2018, now Assistant Professor at Korea Aerospace University
• Jeffrey Johnson, 2017, now at Maeve Automation
• Sven Bambach, 2016, now Research Scientist at Nationwide Children's Hospital
• Stefan Lee, 2016, now Assistant Professor at Oregon State
• Mohammed Korayem, 2015, now at CareerBuilder
• Kun Duan, 2014, now at Quibi
• Haipeng Zhang, 2014, now Assistant Professor at Shanghai Tech

These are other projects I've worked on that were never polished enough to be publishable, but that someone somewhere might still find interesting. :-)

• Automatic accent restoration in Spanish text, Spring 2005 course project for CS 674
• An Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) unit in VLSI, Fall 1999 course project for CSE 477
• A rudimentary hardware MPEG video decoder, Spring 1999 course project for CSE 471

I love cycling. During graduate school I would take multi-day bike trips spanning hundreds of miles, but the tenure track has made those trips less feasible. These days I stay closer to home, enjoying weekend rides along the beautiful country roads of southern Indiana. I used to ski during winter until I moved to the second flattest state east of the Mississippi.

My current preferred winter activity is swimming in IU's fantastic pools. (My unofficial hobby is to swim in a public lap pool in as many cities of the world as possible (so far: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Blacksburg, Bloomington, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Columbus, Copenhagen, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Erie, Fort Collins, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Hsinchu, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Jamestown, Jerusalem, Kailua-Kona, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Minneapolis, Montreal, Munich, Nashville, New Orleans, Newcastle upon Tyne, Ottawa, Paris, Phoenix, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Jose, Santiago, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, State College, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Vancouver, Venice, Washington, D.C.).

I took piano for 12 years as a child and recently started picking it back up again. I've also been trying to learn organ. Since I can't produce great music myself, I'm happy to live just a few blocks from the amazing IU Jacobs School of Music.

I'm on a perpetual quest to become fluent in Spanish. In addition to taking classes in high school and throughout college and graduate school, I've studied abroad in Spain and Mexico, and I've also traveled to Puerto Rico, Chile, and El Salvador. Despite all that effort, my Spanish is still remarkably lousy. :)

If you like pretty pictures, you might check out my dad's amazing bird photos. My own household flock includes Pichu and Sebastian; alumni are Betsy, Ron, Sally, Toto, Zuma, Rameses, Rameses II, and, of course, Cocoa.