The Computer Science and Engineering department is home to a new research center on computer vision and graphics, computational imaging and augmented reality, to be announced soon. According to a report in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Sony is the largest founding sponsor of the new UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing. Together with Qualcomm, Pixar and Adobe, the companies are investing in a center that “will study everything from virtual and augmented reality to object recognition.”
While a formal announcement is pending the launch of the center’s new website, founding director Ravi Ramamoorthi (pictured) is quoted as saying, “It is exciting to get this level of industry support in such a short timeframe, which indicates the high level of industry involvement with visual computing technologies, and the potential for major societal impact.”
In the same March 13 newspaper article, Ramamoorthi is optimistic that other companies will flock to the center. “We expect to see even more sponsors join the center in the next few months,” he said, “and expect to further grow the visual computing effort and research group within the Jacobs School of Engineering.”
The Center for Visual Computing is the third so-called “agile” research center announced in the past six months within the Jacobs School, and the first to be based in the CSE department. In addition to Ramamoorthi, founding faculty include CSE professors Henrik Wann Jensen, David Kriegman, Zhuowen Tu (joint Cognitive Science and CSE) and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Jurgen Schulze (CSE adjunct).
According to Ramamoorthi, the center has settled on three overarching research themes: mobile visual computing and digital imaging; interactive digital (augmented) reality; and understanding people and their surroundings. For the latter, researchers aim to automate computer understanding of the visual world, from small-scale underwater organisms to large metropolitan environments.
According to Ramamoorthi, the center aims to make a formal announcement before the school’s 2015 Research Expo on April 16. That’s when he is slated to represent the center among the faculty speakers, all of whom are based in the agile centers. His topic: the grand challenges in visual computing.
Read the original San Diego Union-Tribune article about Center for Visual Computing.