Ruzena Bajcsy

Last updated
Ruzena Bajcsy
Ruzena Bajcsy.jpg
Born
Ružena Kučerová

(1933-05-28) May 28, 1933 (age 91)
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma mater Slovak Technical University; Stanford
Known forArtificial intelligence; Computer Vision; Robotics; Sensor Networks; Control; Biosystems; General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory
Awards Benjamin Franklin Medal (2009)
ACM Distinguished Service Award (2003)
Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award (2003)
ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2001)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2013)
John Scott Medal (2017)
Order of the White Double Cross, 2nd class (2022)
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical Engineering and Computer Science
Institutions University of California, Berkeley; University of Pennsylvania
Doctoral advisor John McCarthy
Doctoral students

Ruzena Bajcsy (born 28 May 1933 Bratislava, Czechoslovakia) is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, [1] where she is also director emerita of CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society).

Contents

She was previously professor and chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the founding director of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, and a member of the Neurosciences Institute in the School of Medicine. She has also been head of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, with authority over a $500 million budget. She supervised at least 26 doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania. [2]

She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. [3]

She is the mother of computer-science professor Klara Nahrstedt. [4] [5]

Early life

Prof. dr. Ruzena Bajcsy with the members of the GRASP Lab in front of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab 1984.jpg
Prof. dr. Ruzena Bajcsy with the members of the GRASP Lab in front of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania

Bajcsy was born on 28 May 1933 in Bratislava,Czechoslovakia (in today's Slovakia) to a Jewish family. Although her family was initially spared from Nazi concentration camps due to her father's work as a civil engineer, most of her adult relatives were killed by the Nazis in late 1944. Bajcsy and her sister, the only survivors in the immediate family, were supported as war orphans by the Red Cross; Bajcsy was later raised in orphanages and in foster care. A strong student in mathematics, she has said that she chose instead to study electrical engineering as a university student at Slovak University of Technology because the career prospects for mathematics students at the time led to teaching, which in Communist Eastern Europe required a commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology that she was unwilling to provide. [6]

Education

She obtained Master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, and an additional Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University. Her thesis was "Computer Identification of Textured Visual Scenes", and her advisor was John McCarthy. [2]

In 2001, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. [7] From 2003 to 2005, she was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. The November 2002 issue of Discover named her to its list of the 50 most important women in science. [8] In 2012, she received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. [9]

Writings

She has written over 225 articles in journals and conference proceedings, 25 book chapters, and 66 technical reports and has been on many editorial boards.[ citation needed ]

Current research

Her current research centers on artificial intelligence; biosystems and computational biology; control, intelligent systems, and robotics; graphics and human-computer interaction, computer vision; and security.[ citation needed ]

Memberships

Bajcsy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering [10] and the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine [11] as well as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), [12] the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, [13] the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, [14] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [15]

Awards

Bajcsy received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award in 2001, the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2003, and the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award in 2003.

Bajcsy's most current research has helped her gain recognition from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Ruzena Bajcsy received the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for her innovations in robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images. Additionally, she was the winner of the 2009 ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute. [16]

Bajcsy has been named by the IEEE Board of Directors the recipient of the 2013 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award for her contributions in the field of robotics and automation with the following citation: "For contributions to computer vision, the active perception paradigm, and medical robotics". [17]

Bajcsy is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards. [18]

Bajcsy received the Order of the White Double Cross form the president of Slovakia Zuzana Čaputová, Second Class, on 20 September 2022, for extraordinary spreading of the good name of the Slovak Republic abroad. [19]

Related Research Articles

The University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering is the public engineering school of the University of California, Berkeley. Established in 1931, it occupies fourteen buildings on the northeast side of the main campus and also operates the 150-acre (61-hectare) Richmond Field Station. It is also considered highly selective and is consistently ranked among the top engineering schools in both the nation and the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judea Pearl</span> Computer scientist (born 1936)

Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of several books, including the technical Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, and The Book of Why, a book on causality aimed at the general public.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shafi Goldwasser</span> Israeli American computer scientist (born 1959)

Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Liskov</span> American computer scientist

Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract data types and the accompanying principle of data abstraction, along with the Liskov substitution principle, which applies these ideas to object-oriented programming, subtyping, and inheritance. Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Goldberg</span> American computer scientist

Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ayanna Howard</span> American roboticist (born 1972)

Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuela M. Veloso</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.

George A. Bekey is an American roboticist and the Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniela L. Rus</span> American computer scientist

Daniela L. Rus is a Romanian-American roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the books Computing the Future, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, and The Mind's Mirror: Risk and Reward in the Age of AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Canny</span> Australian computer scientist

John F. Canny is an Australian computer scientist, and Paul E Jacobs and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He has made significant contributions in various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jitendra Malik</span> Indian-American academic (born 1960)

Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision.

Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.

Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP, of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massoud Pedram</span> Iranian American computer engineer

Massoud Pedram is an Iranian American computer engineer noted for his research in green computing, energy storage systems, low-power electronics and design, electronic design automation and quantum computing. In the early 1990s, Pedram pioneered an approach to designing VLSI circuits that considered physical effects during logic synthesis. He named this approach layout-driven logic synthesis, which was subsequently called physical synthesis and incorporated into the standard EDA design flows. Pedram's early work on this subject became a significant prior art reference in a litigation between Synopsys Inc. and Magma Design Automation.

Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and directs the Coordinated Science Laboratory there. Her research concerns multimedia, quality of service, and middleware.

William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to computer vision.

Jana Košecká is a Slovak computer scientist specializing in computer vision. She is a professor of computer science at George Mason University. Previously, Košecká was a researcher at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chelsea Finn</span> American computer scientist and academic

Chelsea Finn is an American computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University. Her research investigates intelligence through the interactions of robots, with the hope to create robotic systems that can learn how to learn. She is part of the Google Brain group.

Lynne Edwards Parker is Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative at the University of Tennessee. Previously, she was Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer and Founding Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office at the United States' White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is an American roboticist specializing in multi-robot systems, swarm robotics, and distributed artificial intelligence.

Luca P. Carloni is a professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York.. He has been on the faculty at Columbia since 2004. He is an international expert on electronic computer-aided design.

References

  1. Ruzena Bajcsy official page, EECS, College of Engineering, UC Berkeley, USA.
  2. 1 2 Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  3. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-05-27.
  4. Seidlitz, Aaron (May 18, 2022). "Family History: Nahrstedt, Bajcsy Share Stage as First Mother-Daughter Pair Elected to the National Academy of Engineering". Computer Science. UIUC.
  5. "Ruzena Bajcsy". Memory of Nations. Retrieved 24 May 2022.
  6. Bajcsy, Ruzena (9 July 2002). "Oral History: Ruzena Bajcsy". IEEE History Center Oral History Program (Interview). Interviewed by Janet Abbate. Berkeley, California, United States.
  7. "Abstracts and Biographies". www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  8. Discover , November 2002.
  9. "NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER 2012" (PDF). KTH Royal Institute of Technology – Sweden. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  10. "Dr. Ruzena K. Bajcsy Profile on NAE". National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  11. "Directory: IOM Member – Ruzena Bajcsy, Ph.D." Institute of Medicine. Archived from the original on 2013-02-13. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  12. "ACM Fellows". Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  13. "IEEE Fellows List (B)". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original on August 2, 2012. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  14. "AAAI Fellows List". American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  15. "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 5 May 2011.
  16. "Ruzena Bajcsy" . Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  17. "IEEE Robotics and Automation Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-01-09. Retrieved 21 Dec 2012.
  18. "Notable Women in Computing".
  19. Prezident