Panel Session

Biography

Randy Harrell is the Director of Product Marketing for the Telepresence System Business Unit (TSBU). His responsibilities include leading the business unit product marketing team in the definition and specification of the TSBU product solution and go to market efforts. Randy has been employed with Cisco since September 2004 and was part of the initial founding team that brought Cisco TelePresence to market. Prior to Cisco, Randy was the founder and CEO of VSGI, a systems integration company, that specialized in rich media communication solutions to enterprise and mid market companies. The company maintained expertise in visual and data communication, software resource management, and digital microwave bypass technology. After 14 years of successful operations, the company was sold in 2001. His domain experience in visual communications technologies spans 15 years with product, services and business operations experience. Randy earned his BS degree in business from San Diego State University while playing competitive college baseball. Randy resides in Los Gatos, California with his wife and two daughters.

Biography

Jaron Lanier is currently the first Scholar at Large for Microsoft Corporation, and the Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence, CET, UC Berkeley. He received the the IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award in 2009 and an honorary doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2006. Lanier either coined or popularized the term Virtual Reality. His tiny, but hugely influential company, VPL Research, Inc. was founded in 1984. VPL supplied the fledgling world of VR research with key products like EyePhone, the first general purpose, commercial HMD, the DataGlove, and the DataSuit, which provided the first source of full-body 3D motion data. (VPL eventually became part of Sun Microsystems.) Lanier’s team developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using immersive displays, as well as the first avatars, or representations of users within such systems. VPL’s Reality Built for Two, or RB2, became a commercial product in 1989. Lanier and collaborators implemented some of the earliest examples of surgical simulation, rehab, walkthrough, sci viz, and other VR applications. VPL licensed glove technology to Mattel Toys for the PoweGlove, which was the first VR toy. From 1997 to 2001, Jaron was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and also served there as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative. Henry Fuchs, Ruzena Bajcsy, Kostas Daniilidis, Andries van Dam, and Lanier demonstrated the first prototypes of Tele-immersion (including volumetric acquisition and rendering) in 2000. From 1999 to 2002 Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Eyematic Interfaces (later acquired by Google), which created the first real-time facial expression tracking for Avatars based solely on machine vision techniques. From 2001 to 2004 Lanier was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he researched COCODEX, an instrumentation strategy for Tele-immersion. Lanier was the founding member of the Board of Advisors for Linden Labs, makers of Second Life.

Biography

Frantz Lohier is a Managing Director for Innovation and New Technologies with Logitech with 10+ years experience in the Consumer Electronic space and more than 12 mass-produced designs. Mr Lohier holds a Computer Science graduate from l’Ecole Superieur D’Informatique de Paris (Supinfo), an M.Sc. in Robotics from l’Ecole Normal Superieur Des Arts et Metiers (ENSAM)/Paris 6 University and a Ph.D. from Paris 6 Pierre et Marie Curie University in Image processing and Signal Processor Architectures. Mr Lohier holds more than 7 patents and 13 scientific publications and is a Senior IEEE member.

Biography

Greg Welch is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Applied & Materials Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1986 he received a degree in Electrical Technology from Purdue University (with Highest Distinction), and in 1996 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill. Previously he has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Northrop-Grumman’s Defense Systems Division. His research interests include human motion tracking systems, 3D telepresence, projector-based graphics, computer vision and view synthesis, and medical applications of computers. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications in these areas, and is a co-inventor on multiple patents. He has served on numerous program committees, co-chaired workshops, serves on the editorial board of International Journal of Virtual Reality, and is an Associate Editor for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. He maintains an internationally-recognized web site dedicated to the Kalman filter. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and ACM.

Biography

William Wickes is the Director of Research & Development in HP’s HALO Collaboration Services Business Unit, serving in that capacity since HALO’s inception in 2005. He joined the Corvallis (Oregon) Division of HP in 1981 to lead the scientific applications team in calculator R&D. His team developed the operating system that has been the basis of all of HP’s multi-line calculators since the HP-18C in 1986. His other projects include the HP28C in 1987, the world’s first handheld capable of symbolic mathematics, and the HP48SX in 1990, which has morphed into the HP48GX and then HP49g and HP50g as HP’s premium scientific calculators. Wickes joined HP Laboratories in 2000 as the research program manager for the HP/MIT Alliance. He led numerous university collaborations ranging from nanotechnology to the semantic web. Wickes holds a Bachelor of Science degree from UCLA, and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, all in physics. He taught at Princeton for 5 years and at the University of Maryland for 3 before joining HP. He is a full member of the American Astronomical Society, has written six books on calculators, numerous scientific papers in astrophysics and cosmology, and holds 6 patents.

Biography

Zhengyou Zhang is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the forthcoming IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development (IEEE T-AMD), and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE T-MM), the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI), and the Machine Vision and Applications. He was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE T-PAMI) from 1999 to 2004. He is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Science and Engineering. Before joining Microsoft, Zhengyou worked at INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) for 11 years, and was a Senior Research Scientist since 1991, where he worked in the Computer Vision and Robotics group. In 1996-1997, he spent one-year sabbatical as an Invited Researcher at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan. He holds more than 50 US patents and has about 40 patents pending. He also holds a few Japanese patents for his inventions during his sabbatical at ATR. He has published over 200 papers in refereed international journals and conferences, and is the author of several books.