Nicholas Ayache
INRIA, France
John Daugman
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dariu Gavrila
DaimlerChrysler Research, Germany and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nicholas Ayache is a Research Director at INRIA (French Research Institute in Computer Science and Automatic Control), Sophia-Antipolis, France, where he has been the scientific leader of the EPIDAURE research group on medical image analysis and robotics since 1993. He is also teaching graduate courses in computer vision at the Universities of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis and Paris XI and also at Ecole Centrale Paris. During the past 15 years, he has been a scientific consultant for several industrial companies.
Dr. Ayache received his Ph.D in 1983, and his "Thèse d'Etat" in 1988, both in computer science, from the University of Paris XI, on topics related to model based object recognition, passive stereovision, and multisensor fusion. His current research interests are medical image processing and analysis, (including shape and motion representation, rigid and nonrigid registration, tracking and analysis of deformable objects), simulation of surgery (including the modelling of soft tissue), and image guided therapy (in particular in the context of medical robotics). He is also involved in the analysis of functional images and their application to medicine and neurosciences. He is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications in these domains.
Dr. Ayache is currently co-editor in chief of the journal of Medical Image Analysis (Elsevier), a member of the editorial board of the Int. Journal of Computer Vision (Kluwer) and Computer Assisted Surgery (Wiley), associate editor of Transactions on Medical Imaging (IEEE), advisory editor of Videre-Computer Vision Research Journal (MIT-Press), and Medical Imaging Technology (Japanese Society of Medical Imaging).
Dr. Ayache is the author of the books Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots (MIT-Press) and "Vision stéréoscopique et perception multisensorielle" (Inter-Editions). He chaired the first International Conference on Computer Vision, Virtual Reality, and Robotics in Medicine (CVRMed) held in Nice in April 1995, and regularly serves on the editorial board of major conferences in Medical Imaging, Computer Vision, Visualisation, and Robotics including MICCAI, CVPR, ECCV and ICCV.
John Daugman is with the Computing Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. He studied at Harvard University where he obtained his PhD and worked as assistant and associate professor of engineering sciences. In 1989 and 1990 he was appointed professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology on the Toshiba endowed chair in information systems. In 1990 he used a presidential young investigator award to move to Cambridge, England, where he is ever since.
His idea to model the receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex with two-dimensional Gabor functions had a large impact on many areas of science: neurophysiology, psychology, computer science and electrical engineering. Meanwhile, thousands of articles have been published in which this idea has been used. Dr. Daugman made an important contribution to biometrical technology by developing original and effective algorithms for person identification using the iris pattern. This led to a technological breakthrough with wide social impact, ranging from PIN-less identification by automatic transaction machines to passport security and fast check-in at international airports.
Dr. Daugman is member of the editorial boards of many leading journals and received a number of high professional and social honors and awards (e.g. Order of the British Empire, inventor of a millennium products, etc.)
Dariu Gavrila obtained the M.S. Degree in Computer Science from the Free University in Amsterdam in 1990. He received the Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1996. He was a Visiting Researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory in 1996. Since 1997 he is a senior Research Scientist at DaimlerChrysler Research in Ulm, Germany. He was very recently appointed (part-time) Professor at the University of Amsterdam, chairing the area of Intelligent Perception Systems, in 2003.
Mr. Gavrila's long-term interests involve vision systems for detecting human presence and activity, with applications in surveillance, virtual reality and intelligent human-machine interface. Over the past few years, he worked on real-time vision systems on-board vehicles for driver assistance, in particular in the area of pedestrian protection. Mr. Gavrila published numerous scientific articles and served as reviewer for leading conferences and journals.