Looking at People

There is a great need for programs that can describe what people are doing from video. This is difficult to do, because it is hard to identify and track people in video sequences, because we have no canonical vocabulary for describing what people are doing, and because phenomena such as aspect and individual variation greatly affect the appearance of what people are doing. Recent work in kinematic tracking has produced methods that can report the kinematic configuration of the body fairly accurately and fully automatically. More difficult is to tell what to say when we have recovered the body. I will describe recent work on representation in object recognition, and sketch how this might apply to activity recognition.
I am currently a full professor at U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I recently moved from U.C Berkeley, where I was also full professor. I have published over 130 papers on computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning. I have served as program co-chair for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000 and 2011, general co-chair for CVPR 2006, and program co-chair for the European Conference on Computer Vision 2008, and am a regular member of the program committee of all major international conferences on computer vision. I have served five years on the SIGGRAPH program committee, and am a regular reviewer for that conference. I have received best paper awards at the International Conference on Computer Vision and at the European Conference on Computer Vision. I received an IEEE technical achievement award for 2005 for my research and became an IEEE fellow in 2009. My recent textbook, "computer Vision: A Modern Approach" (joint with J. Ponce and published by Prentice Hall) is now widely adopted as a course text (adoptions include MIT, U. Wisconsin-Madison, UIUC, Georgia Tech and U.C. Berkeley).