Text Box: Department of Computer Science at Cornell University Text Box: Text Box: The Conway-Walker Lecture is supported by Drs. Richard and Edythe Conway

Richard Conway and Robert Walker were instrumental in the founding of Cornell’s Computer Science Department in 1965, convincing senior administrators of the need for a PhD program and securing generous funding from the Sloan Foundation to help launch the fledgling unit.

 

Richard Conway, during his long and varied career at Cornell, held a faculty position in Computer Science from 1965 to1983, serving as Chair of the Department 1978-79 and 1983-84. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is widely known for his fundamental contributions to scheduling and computer simulation. Dick is a faculty emeritus of the Johnson School of Management.


Robert Walker was a Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1938 to 1974, serving as its Chair for ten of those years. Bob’s interest in computing and its connections to mathematics grew during his career. He held a half-time faculty appointment in the CS Department until 1968. Bob became emeritus in 1974 and died in 1992.

 

 
Text Box: Unveiled in May 2007, the Street View feature of Google Maps is the result of a substantial engineering effort by a team including mechanical engineers, software engineers, UI designers, computer vision scientists and scores of others. As is true with a number of other projects at Google, the initial vision for Street View was actually provided by Google co-founder Larry Page, who personally collected a street scene video from his moving car in order to bootstrap research in this area. Turning this initial vision into a product required developing major new pieces of technology, including: a robust data collection platform (i.e., a van with lots of camera equipment), a fancy system for computing accurate pose from several imperfect sensors, various software components to stitch, blend, color correct and warp collected imagery, efficient systems to manage a Gargantuan flow of data, JavaScript and Flash software components to integrate Street View to Google Maps, and many others. This presentation will go over some of these components. Text Box: The CONWAY-WALKER Distinguished Lecture Text Box: Thursday August 28, 2008 Text Box: 4:15 pm B17 Upson Hall Reception - 4th Floor Atrium at 3:30pm
Text Box: Street View: Taking Google Maps to Street Level

Luc Vincent

Engineering Director

GOOGLE, INC

Luc Vincent joined Google in 2004. He is an Engineering Director  responsible for several projects centered around computer vision, including Google's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) efforts, Street View, and several other geo-related projects. Before Google, Luc was Chief Scientist, and then Vice President of  Document Imaging at LizardTech, a developer of advanced image compression software. He has over 60 publications in the area of vision, image analysis and document understanding. He recently served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and   Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and for the Journal of Electronic Imaging.