Sensing systems for the automatic recognition of humans and their activities, enabling a machine to interact intelligently and effortlessly with a human-inhabited environment. Applications to intelligent vehicles and surveillance.

Senior Research Scientist (1997 to present)
Machine Perception Dept, Daimler Research and Technology, Ulm, Germany

Project management: acquisition, implementation and review. Responsible for several EU and national projects on pedestrian protection on behalf of DaimlerChrysler: EU WATCH-OVER (2006-2008), EU SAVE-U (2002-2005), PROTECTOR (2000-2002) and the german AKTIV-SFR (2006-2010).

Designed DaimlerChrysler’s pedestrian system which features (video/radar-based) object detection, driver warning and braking in real-time on-board a vehicle demonstrator in urban traffic. The system was demonstrated, among others, at the IV’2004 conference, Tokyo Motor Show 2004 and EU Intelligent Cars event in Brussel, February 2006.

Developed the Chamfer System, a system for shape-based object detection (applications in intelligent vehicles, industrial vision and military). Early system version demonstrated to DaimlerChrysler’s Board of Directors, mid 1999. 

Professor (2003 to present, 1/5 part-time)
Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group, Informatics Institute, Univ. of Amsterdam, NL

Chair in “Intelligent Perception Systems”. Focus on methodologies and systems for the recognition of human activities in dynamic environments, mainly by vision. Research involves aspects in image processing, computer graphics, machine learning, sensor fusion and cognitive modeling. Current pilot application (projects CASSANDRA, MultimediaN Safety Pilot) deals with automatic aggression detection fusing auditory and visual cues.

Lectures and project in the MSc AI course “Design and Organisation of Autonomous Systems”

Research Affiliate (Spring 1996)
Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A.
Collaboration with Prof. A. Pentland´s group on 3-D head model acquisition from single-view image sequences, as part of my Dissertation.

Research Assistant (1992-1996)
Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland, College Park,  U.S.A.
Early work dealt with indexing and matching techniques for large image and spatial databases. For my Dissertation, I developed a vision system for the 3-D tracking and recognition of humans in action.

Teaching Assistant (1990-1992)
Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park,  U.S.A.

Assisted in undergraduate and graduate courses: directed projects, held classroom discussions, etc.

Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science (1996),
University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A.,
Dissertation Title: 3-D Model-based Tracking of Humans in Action,
Advisor: Professor Dr. Larry Davis.

Doctoraal Degree - B.S. and M.S. - in Computer Science (1990),
Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
Thesis Title: 3-D Object Recognition from 2-D Images using Geometric Hashing, Advisor: Professor Dr. Frans Groen.

Propaedeuse Degree - preliminary comprehensive exam - in Physics (1987), Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

V.W.O. Degree - secondary school - (1986),
Barlaeus Gymnasium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
 

• 6th IEEE Conference on Advanced Video- and Signal-based Surveillance (AVSS), London, UK, 2007
• 2nd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), Cluj, Romania, 2006.
• 10th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP), Groningen, The Netherlands, 2003.
• 6th Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), Lommel, Belgium, 2000.

• I/O 2007 Award by the Netherlands Organisation forScientific Research (NWO),
  for quality of ICT research and outreach towards the general public
• Best Paper Award at the IEEE AVSS 2007 conference
• Graduate School Fellowship of the University of Maryland (top 1%)
• Cum Laude at the Doctoraal Degree in Computer Science (top 1%)
• Cum Laude at the Propaedeuse Degree in Physics (top 5%)
• Cum Laude at the V.W.O. Degree (top 2%)

• (Co) Supervised 2 Ph.D. Theses at DaimlerChrysler (2005, 2007)
• (Co) Supervised 11 M.Sc. Theses at Daimler(Chrysler) and Univ. of Amsterdam (2002-2007).
• Served on 9 Ph.D. Committees at the Univ. of Amsterdam, Univ. of Mannheim, TU Darmstadt and ETH Zürich (2002-2007)
• (Co) Supervision of 3 Ph.D. Theses and 2 M.Sc. Theses at Daimler and the Univ. of Amsterdam, in progress.

See listing here.

Number of times cited, top five papers, excluding self-references¹

1. “The Visual Analysis of Human Movement”, CVIU’99: 226
     (35-th most cited paper in Computer Science published in 1999²)
2. “3D Model-based Tracking of Humans in Action”,  CVPR’96: 114
3. “Real-time Object Detection for Smart” Vehicles”, ICCV’99: 36
4. “Autonomous Driving goes Downtown”, IEEE Intelligent Syst.’98: 35
5. “Pedestrian Detection from a Moving Vehicle”, ECCV’00: 34

Among the 5000 most cited authors in Computer Science (normalized by publication year), total of 437 citations

¹ Web of Science, http://portal.isiknowledge.com (August 2007)
² CiteSeer - http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu (August 2006).

• Reviewer for computer vision journals and conferences: IJCV, Trans. on PAMI, Trans. on ITS, CVIU, CVPR and ECCV.
• Member of Program Committee: ECCV (2004 and 2008), DAGM (2001, 2004, 2007 and 2008), Face and Gesture 2008.
• Evaluator of proposals at EU FP6 calls (Cognitive Systems 2005, Advanced Robotics 2006)
• Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and of the Dutch Pattern Recognition Society (NVBVPH)

German patent granted in the area of vision-based driver assistance, 2002.
 

See listing here.

Fluent in English, German, Dutch and Romanian. Proficiency in French and Spanish.