Keynote Speakers

Ramin Zabih is Professor of Computer Science and Radiology at Cornell University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University. Since 2001 he has also held a joint appointment at Cornell's Weill Medical School. His research interests lie in early vision and its applications, especially in medicine. He served as program co-chair for the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2007, and has been an area chair or program committee member for most of the main vision conferences for the past decade. He also serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is best known for his work on the use of graph cuts for computer vision. Two of his papers with Vladimir Kolmogorov on this topic received Best Paper awards at the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2002.

Cordelia Schmid holds a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and a Doctorate, also in Computer Science, from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG). Her doctoral thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval" received the best thesis award from INPG in 1996. She received the Habilitation degree in 2001 for her thesis entitled "From Image Matching to Learning Visual Models". Dr. Schmid was a post-doctoral research assistant in the Robotics Research Group of Oxford University in 1996-1997. Since 1997 she has held a permanent research position at INRIA Rhône-Alpes, where she is a research director and directs the INRIA team called LEAR for LEArning and Recognition in Vision. Dr. Schmid is the author of over eighty technical publications. She has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2001-2005) and for the International Journal of Computer Vision (2004-), and she was program chair of the 2005 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. In 2006, she was awarded the Longuet-Higgins prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision that have withstood the test of time. She is a senior member of IEEE.