Invited Speakers

Invited Plenaries

We are very pleased that Narendra Ahuja will be speaking at FG2006. He is currently the Donald Biggar Willet Professor of the Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Beckman Institute. Amongst other awards, He received the 1999 Emanuel R. Piore award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the 1998 Technology Achievement Award of the International Society for Optical Engineering. His research interests span many areas of computer vision including 3D and temporal analysis, sensors and processing and learning and understanding. Amongst many papers and books, he is author of Face Detection and Hand Gesture Recognition for Vision-Based Human Computer Interaction published by Kluwer in 2001.

As we are keen to encourage research between psychology and face and gesture analysis, we will be very pleased to hear Vicki Bruce who is Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996, Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) in 1997, and Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. She was awarded the OBE for services to Psychology in 1997, and in that year was awarded the BPS Presidents' Award for distinguished contributions to psychology. In 2000 she was co-winner of the BPS Cognitive Psychology award with Mike Burton (Glasgow) and Peter Hancock (Stirling). In 2001 she was awarded the BPS Book award with Andy Young (York), for their 1998 book, published by Oxford University Press, In the eye of the beholder: The science of face perception.

Invited Talks

Stan Z. Li is a Researcher at National Lab of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), and the Director of the Center for Biometrics Research and Testing (CBRT). He worked at Microsoft Research Asia as a Researcher from May 2000 to Aug 2004. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research interest is in face recognition technologies, biometrics, intelligent surveillance, pattern recognition, and machine learning. He is a senior member of IEEE and currently serves as editorial board of Pattern Recognition, and program committees of various international conferences. He has published several books, including "Handbook of Face Recognition" (Springer-Verlag, 2004) and "Markov Random Field Modeling in Image Analysis" (Springer-Verlag, 2nd edition in 2001), and over 200 refereed papers and book chapters in these areas.

Volker Blanz heads an independent research group on learning-based modeling of objects in the Max-Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication (Saarbruecken, Germany and Stanford, USA). His research interests are in the fields of face recognition, 3D face modeling and animation, example-based shape reconstruction, machine learning and human perception. His work on a morphable model of 3D Faces and an algorithm for reconstructing the 3D shape of faces from single images received the SIGGRAPH 1999 Impact Paper Award. He was a PhD student at MPI for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen (Germany) and University of Tuebingen, where he graduated in 2000, and he was a visiting researcher at AT&T Bell Labs, where he worked on multi-class Support Vector Machines, and at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT. In Computer Vision, he developed an algorithm for face recognition across changes both in pose and illumination. His papers on facial animation and on model-based image processing received the Guenter Enderle Award for the Best Paper at Eurographics 2003 and 2004.

Seong-Whan Lee is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Director of the Center for Artificial Vision Research, Korea University. He obtained the Outstanding Young Researcher Award at the 2nd International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition in 1993. He also received an Annual Pattern Recognition Society Award for an outstanding contribution to the Pattern Recognition Journal in 1998. He is Associate Editor of Pattern Recognition, the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, and the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. He is a fellow of International Association for Pattern Recognition and a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society. His research interests include face and gesture recognition, biometrics, video surveillance, and human-robot interaction. He has more than 200 publications on computer vision and pattern recognition in international journals and conference proceedings, and authored more than 10 books in these areas.