June 19, 2008

Robotics Expert Takeo Kanade Selected as SIGGRAPH 2008 Featured Speaker

Los Angeles - ACM SIGGRAPH has selected Dr. Takeo Kanade, professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and the director of Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University, as the third and final featured speaker for SIGGRAPH 2008 to be held in Los Angeles this August. 
"We are honored to have an expert of this caliber provide insights into the evolution of robotics and vision while also providing our attendees with his perspective of the industry's future," states Jacquelyn Martino, SIGGRAPH 2008 Conference Chair from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. "Dr. Kanade is a great complement to our other fabulous featured speakers - Catherine Owens and Ed Catmull."
Dr. Kanade will present "My Personal Take on the Last 30 Years in Robotics and Vision." He works in multiple areas of robotics including computer vision, visual and multimedia technology, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, and sensors.
 
Development of EyeVision for Super Bowl 2001 broadcast, based on his multicamera Virtualized Reality technology, is one of his best publicly known results. He has written more than 250 technical papers and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.  He is also the director of Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo, which he founded in 2001. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, where he was the director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. Dr. Kanade has won numerous awards including: a Franklin Institute Bower Award, Okawa Prize, C&C Award, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Pioneer Award.
 
Based on overwhelming positive feedback provided after the switch from a single keynote speaker format to multiple featured speakers in 2007, SIGGRAPH will once again provide focused content by offering presentations from different prominent industry leaders and technology experts. Each featured speaker will provide key insights on the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques.