Sunday, July 24, 2011

CMU Robotics Instititue's vision finds a home at Google

Congratulations to PittPatt for their recent acquisition by Google.  PittPatt, a Pittsburgh-based startup, has its roots in CMU's Robotics Institute (where I'm currently a PhD student).  Henry Schneiderman, the CEO of PittPatt, did some truly hardcore computer vision work while doing his PhD under Takeo Kanade.


Two famous papers by Hendry Schneiderman and Takeo Kanade are the following:
H. Schneiderman, T. Kanade. "A Statistical Method for 3D Object Detection Applied to Faces and Cars". IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2000) pdf format


H. Schneiderman, T. Kanade. "Probabilistic Modeling of Local Appearance and Spatial Relationships for Object Recognition." IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 1998). pdf format


Here is what the front page of PittPatt states:

Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We've worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it's a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.
We look forward to joining the team at Google!
The team at Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition

Perhaps Henry's success is yet another reason to come to CMU to get a vision PhD...

2 comments:

  1. Hi Tomasz!
    Concerning your last phrase, I was interested about going for PhD to RI or ML department. Although it is not topical for me now, I guess there are a lot of folks who'd like to know more, for example I recently learned about black Fridays from Matt Welsh's blog. Could your share more information like that in your blog?

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  2. Hey Roman,

    I can't blog until next week -- I have my PhD thesis defense on Aug 8th. The rest of life will have to be delayed until then.
    -T

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