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Biographic Information

Brief Bio - Matthew A. Turk

Matthew Turk received a B.S. from Virginia Tech in Electrical Engineering in 1982, then an M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984.  His masters work was in the area of robot fine motion planning. he worked for Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace from 1984 to 1987, primarily on vision for autonomous robot navigation (part of DARPA's ALV program, the precursor to the recent DARPA Grand Challenge events). In 1987 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. from the Media Lab in 1991 for his work on automatic face recognition. A paper on this work received an IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper award at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 1991.  After a brief post-doc at MIT, in 1992 Matthew moved to Grenoble, France as a visiting researcher at LIFIA/ENSIMAG, then took a position at Teleos Research (in Palo Alto, CA) in 1993. In 2000 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he is now a full Professor in the Computer Science Department and Chair of the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program. He co-directs the Four Eyes Lab, where the research focus is on the “four I’s” of Imaging, Interaction, and Innovative Interfaces. He is a founding member and chair of the advisory board for the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and on the editorial board of the journal of Image and Vision Computing.

Research Interests:

Computer vision, human-computer interaction, graphics and imaging, digital media, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Vision-based and perceptual interfaces, analysis of human movement and activity, multimodal interfaces, multimodal biometrics.

Academic Degrees:

• Ph.D. (1991), The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

• M.S. (1984), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

• B.S. (1982), Department of Electrical Engineering, Virginia Tech (VPI&SU), Blacksburg, VA

Professional Positions:

Recent Awards and Honors:

• One of the Best Image Processing and Computer Vision Papers in SIBGRAPI 2006 (“Dealing with multi-scale depth changes and motion in depth edge detection,” with R. Feris and R. Raskar) - October 2006

• Best Paper Award at the 2004 IEEE Workshop on Real-Time Vision for Human Computer Interaction (“Fast 2D hand tracking with flocks of features and multi-cue integration,” with M. Kölsch) - July 2004

• Communication and Technology Top Paper Award for paper (“Non-Zero Sum Gaze and Persuasion,” with J. Bailenson, A. Beal, J. Blascovich, and J. Loomis) selected for presentation at the 54th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association - May 2004

• “Most Influential Paper of the Decade” award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Workshop on Machine Vision Applications (2000)

Previous Affiliations:

• EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) - VRAI Group [August 2003, July 2004]

• Microsoft Research [1994-2000]

• Teleos Research (Palo Alto, CA) (no longer in service) [1993-1994]

• IMAG (Institut d'Informatique et de Mathematiques Appliquees de Grenoble) (Grenoble, France) [1992]

• MIT Media Lab - Vision and Modeling Group (Cambridge, MA) [1987-1991]

• Martin Marietta Aerospace (Denver, CO) - (now Lockheed Martin) [1984-1987]

• Carnegie Mellon ECE Dept. (Pittsburgh, PA) [1982-1984]

• Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA) [1978-1982]