Angelopoulou named in $3.5 million NSF research grant
Among the most competitive areas of high-tech computer research today is digital graphics environments - a field in which researchers seek literally to create visual worlds of extreme subtlety and plasticity. The research now being done at Stevens Institute of Technology has immense implications, not only for Hollywood movie special effects, but also for the way in which we interact with computer environments at home and in the office.
Dr. Elli Angelopoulou, an assistant professor of computer science at Stevens, is a co-investigator for a 5-year, $3.5 million research grant from the National Science Foundation. The specific granting agency is the NSF's new Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The ITR's board reviewed more than 1,400 proposals before disbursing $90 million in funding among just 200 applicants.
The winning proposal is titled Interacting with the Visual World: Capturing, Understanding, and Predicting Appearance.
Dr. Angelopoulou will be working with colleagues from several institutions. Dr. Shree K. Nayar, who is also the principal investigator for the research, will head the team from Columbia University. Also involved will be computer science and electrical engineering experts from Yale, Stanford, U.C.-Berkeley and Rutgers University.
The goal of the research team is to develop the technical tools needed to achieve a wide variety of complex manipulations of digitized visual data. Once formulated, advanced new interfaces will enable a user to remove or to add objects freely to an image scene, to change the scene qualitatively, or to interact in other complex ways with graphical, video and other visual multimedia applications. At present, there are severe limitations to such interactivity.
Dr. Angelopoulou holds a bachelor's degree from the American College of Greece in Athens, and a master's degree in computer science from the American University in Washington, D.C. She earned her doctorate in computer science from Johns Hopkins University (1997).
Before joining Stevens in 1999, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the General Robotics Automation and Sensory Perception Laboratory (GRASP). During her time at GRASP, she established and equipped a photometry multispectral imaging laboratory. This enabled GRASP researchers to begin investigation into photometric invariants in multispectral images. Photometry is the field of Computer Vision that extracts shape and material information from images by studying the interaction of light with the various objects in a scene.
At Stevens, Dr. Angelopoulou is continuing her work in photometry. She has established the Computer Vision Laboratory in the Lieb Building on the Stevens campus, maintaining also her close affiliation with GRASP. She currently teaches courses in interactive computer graphics, computer vision, and data structures and algorithms.
For a complete description of the Interacting with the Visual World project, please visit the project website at www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/NSF-ITR.
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.
Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.
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