Egocentric Computer Vision, for Fun and for Science - To Be Rescheduled

Title: Egocentric Computer Vision, for Fun and for Science

Abstract:The typical datasets we use to train and test computer vision algorithms consist of millions of consumer-style photos downloaded from the Internet. But this imagery is, arguably, very artificial: it’s significantly different from what humans actually see as they go about their daily lives. Low-cost, lightweight wearable cameras (like GoPro) make it possible to record people's lives from a first-person, "egocentric" perspective that approximates their actual field of view. In this talk, I’ll share some of our recent work on studying computer vision from the egocentric point of view. I'll argue that the egocentric perspective offers an opportunity for a more human-centered approach to computer vision research. In addition to "fun" consumer applications, I’ll talk about our joint work with developmental psychologists that has used first person cameras on young children to better understand how they learn --- and, in the process, how we might improve computer vision. 

Bio: David Crandall is the Luddy Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs the Luddy Artificial Intelligence Center. He obtained the Ph.D. from Cornell University in Computer Science, and B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Pennsylvania State University. He was also a Senior Research Scientist at Eastman Kodak Company from 2001-2003 and a postdoc at Cornell from 2008-2010. He has published over 200 technical articles in top international venues, has received best paper awards or nominations in CVPR, WWW, CHI, ICCV, and ICDL, and has been funded by NSF, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, Meta, Google, IARPA, IN3, ETRI, the U.S. Navy, DTRA, AnalytixIN, and NIH. He is Co-Program Chair of CVPR 2024, ICDL 2024, and WACV 2023, Associate Program Chair of AAAI 2026, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has received an NSF CAREER award, two Google Faculty Research awards, an IU Trustees Teaching Award, a Grant Thornton Fellowship, a Luddy Professorship, the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award, and is a Distinguished Member of the ACM.