Gregory D. Hager | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania, Luther College |
Known for | Vision-based robotics, computer vision, human-machine collaborative systems, computer-integrated medicine |
Title | Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science |
Awards | AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, MICCAI Fellow, AIMBE Fellow, Hans Fischer Fellow, TUM Ambassador, Kuka Innovation Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer Vision, Robotics, Medical Imaging, Computer-Integrated Medicine |
Institutions | Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Technical University of Munich |
Website | cs |
Gregory D. Hager (born May 9, 1961) is the Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University.
His principal areas of research are collaborative and vision-based robotics, time-series analysis of image data, and medical applications of image analysis and robotics. Hager develops real-time computer vision algorithms for robotic systems. His work offers novel applications for automated surgical training, medical imaging and diagnostics, and computer-enhanced interventional medicine.
Hager was born in Waukon, Iowa. He graduated summa cum laude from Luther College in 1983. Hager went on to earn a master's degree (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) from University of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of advisors Dr. Dale Miller and Dr. Max Mintz, respectively. He received the Rubinoff Dissertation Prize for his PhD Thesis entitled "Active Reduction of Uncertainty in Multi-Sensor Systems." [1]
Immediately following his PhD, Hager was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe (1988–90), and was on the faculty at Yale University prior to joining Johns Hopkins in 1999.
At Johns Hopkins, Hager is the Mandell Bellmore Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He also holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Surgery. From 2010 - 2015, he served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science. In 2016, Hager became the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, a multidisciplinary research center aimed at driving engineering innovations in healthcare. [2]
His laboratory, the Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab (CIRL), studies problems that involve dynamic, spatial interaction at the intersection of imaging, robotics, and human-computer interaction.
Hager has made many highly cited contributions to computer vision and robotics. His early work focused on visual tracking and vision-based control for manipulation. Together with Seth Hutchinson and Peter Corke, he authored a tutorial on vision-based motion control for robotics [3] which continues to be one of the most highly cited articles published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
In addition to vision-based control, [4] [5] [6] Hager has also published influential articles on visual tracking, [7] [8] [9] [10] pose estimation from images, [11] and collaborative control. [12]
In the area of medicine, Hager is known for pioneering work on the "language of surgery" which seeks to model surgical procedures and evaluate surgical skill from recorded operative data. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
He has numerous publications in other areas, including ultrasound elastography, [19] [20] [21] activity recognition from video images, [22] [23] vision-based navigation, [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] 3D reconstruction from images, [29] [30] [31] and robot motion planning, [32] [33] [34] [35]
Hager's many contributions to the field of vision-based robotics has earned him status as an IEEE Fellow. Additionally, he has been named a Fellow of the MICCAI Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
In 2014, he was awarded a Hans Fischer Fellowship at the Technical University of Munich's Institute of Advanced Study. [36]
In 2024, he joined the National Science Foundation as Assistant Director of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. [37]
Hager has served on numerous prominent review committees and panels. Together with Susan Graham, he co-chaired the 2015 Review of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD) and provided congressional testimony on the report. [38] He was a member of the inaugural "100 Year Study on Artificial Intelligence"; [39] a roundtable on AI and foreign policy held by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine; and a panel at the 2018 AAAS annual meeting on "Artificial Intelligence: Augmenting Not Replacing People". [40] He is a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) advisory committee, a member of the governing board of the International Federation of Robotics Research, and a past board member of the Computing Research Association. Hager is the past chair of the Computing Community Consortium, where he led multiple initiatives for the computing research community, including the BRAIN initiative, AI for Social Good, and Industry-Academic Relations.
Hager has served on the organizing committee for several major conferences including ICCV 2015 (General Chair), CVPR 2013 (Program Chair), ISRR 2017 (General Chair). He has served as associate editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision, the International Journal of Robotics Research, the Transactions on Robotics, and the ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.
Hager is a co-founder of two startups: Clear Guide Medical, whose platform enables doctors and technicians to perform more accurate ultrasound-guided procedures, and Ready Robotics, dedicated to making industrial robots easier to use. He has served as technical advisor to two others - Theater.io which develops systems for video-based analysis of surgery, and Ikona medical which developed software for enhanced capsule endoscopy review. From September 2022 to May 2024 Hager was on leave from Johns Hopkins to serve as Director of Applied Science for Amazon Just Walk Out Technologies and the Amazon Dash Cart and subsequently leading technical development for Amazon Robotics.
Robert M. Haralick is Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Haralick is one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition, and image analysis. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow and past president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Professor Haralick is the King-Sun Fu Prize winner of 2016, "for contributions in image analysis, including remote sensing, texture analysis, mathematical morphology, consistent labeling, and system performance evaluation".
Linda G. Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a professor of electrical engineering, and adjunct professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington.
Visual servoing, also known as vision-based robot control and abbreviated VS, is a technique which uses feedback information extracted from a vision sensor to control the motion of a robot. One of the earliest papers that talks about visual servoing was from the SRI International Labs in 1979.
In robotics and computer vision, visual odometry is the process of determining the position and orientation of a robot by analyzing the associated camera images. It has been used in a wide variety of robotic applications, such as on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
MiroSurge is a presently prototypic robotic system designed mainly for research in minimally invasive telesurgery. In the described configuration, the system is designed according to the master slave principle and enables the operator to remotely control minimally invasive surgical instruments including force/torque feedback. The scenario is developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics within the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
Masakatsu G. Fujie is a Japanese scientist who has played a major role in cutting-edge research in biomedical engineering. He has been responsible for many advances in the field of robotics.
Jagdishkumar Keshoram Aggarwal is an American computer scientist, who is currently retired and is Cullen Trust Endowed Emeritus Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his contributions in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing focusing on human motion and activities. He served in various positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer of the University of Texas at Austin and other institutions.
Subhasis Chaudhuri is an Indian electrical engineer and former director at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is a former K. N. Bajaj Chair Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering of IIT Bombay. He is known for his pioneering studies on computer vision and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. the National Academy of Sciences, India, Indian Academy of Sciences, and Indian National Science Academy. He is also a fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2004 for his contributions to Engineering Sciences.
Dorin Comaniciu is a Romanian-American computer scientist. He is the Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation at Siemens Healthcare.
René Vidal is a Chilean electrical engineer and computer scientist who is known for his research in machine learning, computer vision, medical image computing, robotics, and control theory. He is the Herschel L. Seder Professor of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the founding director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS).
Alan Yuille is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computational Cognitive Science with appointments in the departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Yuille develops models of vision and cognition for computers, intended for creating artificial vision systems. He studied under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University on a PhD in theoretical physics, which he completed in 1981.
Muyinatu "Bisi" A. Lediju Bell is a researcher and faculty member. She is the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the director of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Systems Engineering Laboratory.
Jason Joseph Corso is Co-Founder / CEO of the computer vision startup Voxel51 and a Professor of Robotics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.
Jerry L. Prince is the William B. Kouwenhoven Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He has over 44,000 citations, and an h-index of 85.
Alois Christian Knoll is German computer scientist and professor at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is head of the Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Embedded Systems.
Jiaya Jia is a tenured professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is an IEEE Fellow, the associate editor-in-chief of one of IEEE’s flagship and premier journals- Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), as well as on the editorial board of International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).
Moshe Shoham is a professor emeritus in the faculty of mechanical engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.