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Other fields such as Mathematics and Chemistry have had academic family trees of adviser-student relationships. Now, the Computer Vision Genealogy Project (CVGP) has been launched. The website, built by Jia-Bin Huang, Wen-Sheng Chu, and Kuo-Chuan Chiu encourages computer vision researchers to make and edit entries. So far, 271 researchers have been entered.

According to a news article, robotics expert Rodney Brooks is retiring from MIT at age 55. The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is well known as the co-founder of iRobot, and for his scientific contributions to computer vision, mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. He will be focusing full-time on his newest company, Heartland Robotics.

The Guardian has published an interview with one of the computer vision researchers working for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Hannah Fraser is working on the My eDirector 2012 project that will enable viewers to personalize their view of sports events like the Olympics. Among other tools, computer vision methods for person identification and tracking will be used. The project is partially funded by the EU and is a collaboration with a number of partners from academia and industry.

Submitted by Boaz Super

Professor Takeo Kanade, director of the Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon University, will be honored with the first Tateisi Foundation Award on May 18th. The award includes a US$50,000 prize. Professor Kanade is known for many contributions to computer vision, from specific methods such as the Lucas-Kanade method for estimating optical flow, to leadership in systems incorporating computer vision such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and virtualized reality. More information can be found in an article in Dr. Dobb's.

Dr. Sylvie Thiébaux of Australia National University has been appointed as the new Director of the Australian National Information and Communications Technology Center of Excellence (NICTA) Canberra Laboratory. An expert in artificial intelligence, Dr. Thiébaux said that "strengthening our leading research capabilities in computer vision" is part of the plans for the 145-person Canberra Lab.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the winners of the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Awards. One of the honorable mention awards is going to a computer vision dissertation by Derek Hoiem for Seeing the World behind the Image: Spatial Layout for 3D Scene Understanding, at Carnegie-Mellon University.

In a letter included in Google's annual report, co-founder Sergey Brin talks about one of computer vision's most desired and challenging applications, content based image search:

"Integrating images into search remains a challenge, primarily because we are so reliant on the surrounding text to gauge a picture's relevance. In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what's depicted in the image itself."

Dr. Jeffrey Bloom has joined Dialogic Corporation as the Director of Video Technologies. He brings his expertise in digital watermarking and video analytics to his new position. According to a press release, the position is newly created for the development of Dialogic’s video products. Previously, Dr. Bloom was leading a research team at Thomson Consumer Electronics, investigating multimedia content security.