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The Carl Pulfrich Award is given annually by the parent company of Leica Geosystems for innovations in photogrammetry, geodesy, and earth sciences. This year the award goes to to Dr. Heiko Hirschmüller, Stereo Vision Scientist at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). According to the chairman of the award committee, Prof. Dr. Dieter Fritsch,

”The application of Semi-Global Matching (SGM) for the generation of very dense surface models has a positive and sustainable impact on using photogrammetry, Computer Vision today and in future – it is a game changer in the point cloud generation business for the benefits of using photos”.

More information is available in a press release.

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Professor Noah Snavely of Cornell University has been named a 2011 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow. The fellowship comes with a $200,000 award over two years. According to Microsoft,

"Noah Snavely is interested in using massive collections of images on the web to better understand and visualize our world. His research builds new computer-vision algorithms for scalable 3-D reconstruction, new graphics techniques for experiencing places through online photos, and new ways to enable communities of photographers to capture useful image collections. His software is being used by educators, artists, and scientists across a range of disciplines."

An article in PC World credits Microsoft's Photosynth as having been inspired by Snavely's work.

Related articles on Computer Vision Central:

• Microsoft releases Photosynth for iPhone but not Windows Phone
• Digital photo interface animates face
• Improved Photosynth can model a city in hours

Press release from Boulder Imaging

Boulder, Colorado – NEWS RELEASE, July 4, 2011 – Boulder Imaging, a world leader in high performance quality inspection, machine vision, and high speed imaging solutions, announced today that Neil Vanasse has joined the company as a Senior Optical Solutions Engineer. Mr. Vanasse is an optical and mechanical engineer with over fifteen years of experience. Mr. Vanasse will be designing imaging solutions around the company’s flagship product lines Vision Inspectort™ Intelligent Machine Vision and Quazar High Performance Digital Video Recorder (HPDVR)™.

Researchers at the University of Surrey, UK (Zdenek Kalal and Krystian Mikolajczyk) have developed a tracking system that learns from mistakes and improves its performance. The system is developed under the project entitled "Predator: A Smart Camera that Learns from Experience." The results of the system resemble the performance of human vision, for use in many applications including visual surveillance, assisted driving, and accessibility for users with disabilities. For this work, Dr. Kalal received a 'Technology Everywhere' award from the U.K.'s research funding council. More information is available in a press release.

Press release from Carnegie-Mellon University

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, the 2010 winner of the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions to research in computer vision and robotics.

The Newell Award, named for one of the founding fathers of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, recognizes career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. It includes a $10,000 prize and is supported by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and individual contributors. The award will be presented June 4 at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose, Calif.

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has named its new 2011 members -- and two of the 68 new members are computer vision researchers. The NAE press release citations are:

Daphne Koller, professor, department of computer science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For contributions to representation, inference, and learning in probabilistic models with applications to robotics, vision, and biology.

Jitendra Malik, Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley. For contributions to computer vision and image analysis.

The ACM has named Harvard Professor Leslie G. Valiant as the winner of the Turing Award for 2010. The ACM award citation mentions the influence of Professor Valiant's theoretical research on handwriting recognition and computer vision, among other fields. The ACM press release is included below.

NEW YORK, March 9, 2011 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision.

Professor Eric Grimson, a prominent computer vision researcher at MIT, has been named to be the next Chancellor of MIT. Professor Grimson is known for research in many basic and applied areas of computer vision, including stereo, object recognition, activity recognition, image-guided surgery, and medical image analysis. More information is available in an MIT press release.

Professor Daniel Cremers of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been awarded a research grant by the European Research Council (ERC). According to BioScience Technology, the grant will fund Prof. Cremers' team to develop new, more efficient "Convex Optimization Methods for Computer Vision and Image Analysis."

Professor Andrew Blake, who founded the computer vision research group at Microsoft Research Cambridge in 1999, has been appointed as the new managing director of Microsoft's Cambridge labs. The Cambridge labs provided key machine learning technologies for the Xbox Kinect released last month. More information about Professor Blake and Microsoft Research Cambridge can be found in a Business Weekly article.