When: 9:00AM ~ 10:30AM, December 4, 2017

Where: CSB130

Abstract:The CS department can be justly proud of its accomplishments. At the same time, we face a teaching crisis and are at a research crossroads. More students want to take our classes than we have seats, and industry wants to hire more graduates than we can produce. As a research field, CS is diversifying, creating new research areas and opportunities for collaboration, but we need the expertise to take advantage of them. A lack of diversity also diminishes our department. This talk will present a future vision for the department that addresses these challenges and how to get there.

Bio:Bruce Draper has twenty years of experience as a faculty member and computer vision researcher. After earning his B.S. from Yale, he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in the computer vision lab of Ed Riseman and Allen Hanson. From 1993-1996 he was a post-doctoral researcher at UMass working on Unmanned Ground Vehicles (i.e. self-driving cars) with roboticists from CMUs Robotics Institute. He came to CSU as an Asst. Professor in 1996, where he formed the computer vision lab with Ross Beveridge. He was promoted to Assoc. Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2010. Together with Ross Beveridge, he has worked with experts in HPC to implement vision algorithms on FPGAs; with statisticians on face recognition; with mathematicians and psychologists on biologically-inspired vision; and with industrial roboticists from iRobot on activity recognition. He is now working with specialists in HCI and Computational Linguistics on multi-modal communication.