Computer vision researcher Elli Angelopoulou wins National Science Foundation 2002 Early Career Award

Dr. Elli Angelopoulou, an assistant professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award for 2002.

Angelopoulou received the grant for outstanding work in "exploring the multispectral frontier in computer vision," according to the NSF. Her research goal is to augment human perception by moving beyond the normal, tri-chromatic spectrum of vision to discover new visual worlds that are imperceptible to the human observer. This work has many implications in the realm of computer graphics and multimedia, as well as for the development of "seeing" technologies for police and defense applications.

The NSF established the CAREER Program to recognize and support those young faculty most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awards are highly competitive, with an acceptance rate of about 20 percent. Since the award's inception, just one quarter have been given to female faculty. Angelopoulou's award carries a cash component of approximately $390,000, to be disbursed over five years.

Dr. Robert Gilman, the Associate Dean for Research Affairs at Stevens' Imperatore School of Sciences and Arts, praised Angelopoulou's achievement.
"The fact that Professor Angelopoulou received a CAREER award," said Gilman, "confirms that she is an outstanding scholar whose ideas and research have the potential to profoundly impact the fields of computer vision and imaging."

Dr. Erich E. Kunhardt, dean of the Imperatore School, at a ceremony honoring Angelopoulou, noted with pride that, in the last few years, all Stevens' faculty in computer science eligible for the CAREER award have received it. "This is an accomplishment few universities can match," he said.
Angelopoulou is also a co-investigator for a 5-year, $3.5 million research grant from the National Science Foundation, involving a number of institutions. The specific granting agency is the NSF's new Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative.

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, Angelopoulou 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, 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.

Angelopoulou is a consulting researcher with NEC Laboratories in Princeton, N.J.

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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