Program

James ‘Jimi’ Crawford
Orbital Insight

After leading software research and development for over two decades, Jimi is founder & CEO of Orbital Insight. Orbital Insight helps business and policy decision makers understand economic and societal trends through geospatial analytics. His corporate focus is to develop artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision, creating a new source of market data for diverse industries.

Before a successful $1B Monsanto acquisition, Jimi was the SVP of Science and Engineering at the Climate Corporation. Prior to that, he was CTO and Software Architect at Moon Express whose goal was putting the first commercial robot on the moon. As the Engineering Director for Google Book Search, he was in charge of Google’s project to scan, index, and make searchable all the world’s books. As EVP of Engineering at Composite Software, he led product development around data visualization. At Nasa Ames Research Center, Jimi led Autonomy and Robotics projects and authored over 15 peer reviewed publications, resulting in five patents. Jimi earned his PhD and Master’s degrees in Computer
Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and BA in Math and Computer Science from Rice University.

He has a long-term interest in photography which led him, most recently, to eastern Idaho to photograph the August total eclipse.

Richard Hartley
University of Toronto, Canada PhD Mathematics, 1976, MSc 1972
Stanford University, MSc Computer Science, 1985
Australian National University, BSc, 1971

Professor Richard Hartley is a member of the computer vision group in the Department of Information Engineering, at the Australian National University, where he has been since January, 2001.

Dr. Hartley worked at the General Electric Research and Development Center from 1985 to 2001. During the period 1985-1988, he was involved in the design and implementation of Computer-Aided Design tools for electronic design and created a very successful design system called the Parsifal Silicon Compiler. In 1991 he was awarded GE’s Dushman Award for this work.

He became involved with Image Understanding and Scene Reconstruction working with GE’s Simulation and Control Systems Division. He worked on several Imaging projects, including medical imaging, document imaging and visual inspection. In 1991, he began an extended research effort in the area of applying projective geometry techniques to reconstruction. This research direction was one of the dominant themes in computer vision research throughout the 1990s. In 2000, he co-authored (with Andrew Zisserman) a book for Cambridge University Press, summarizing the previous decade’s research in this area.

Zhengyou Zhang
Tencent

Zhengyou Zhang received the B.S. degree from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1985, the M.S. degree from the University of Nancy, Nancy, France, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in 1990 and the Doctorate of Science (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in 1994 from the University of Paris XI, Paris, France.

He is a Distinguished Scientist and the Director of Robotics X at Tencent, China, since March 2018. Before that, he was a Partner Research Manager with Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA, for 20 years. Before joining Microsoft Research in March 1998, he was a Senior Research Scientist with INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control), France. In 1996-1997, he spent a one-year sabbatical as an Invited Researcher with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan.

Dr. Zhang is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, and serves or served as an Associate Editor for many journals. He was a General Chair of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017. He received the IEEE Helmholtz Test of Time Award at ICCV 2013 for his paper on camera calibration, now known as Zhang’s method.