Hartmut Neven

Hartmut Neven (born 1964 in Aachen, Germany) is a scientist working in computational neurobiology, robotics and computer vision. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition.

Education

Hartmut Neven studied Physics and Economics in Köln, Paris, Tübingen, Aachen, Jerusalem and Brazil. He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics under Valentino Braitenberg. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" written under the tutelage of Christoph von der Malsburg.

Work

Neven was assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. Later he returned as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at USC’s Information Sciences Institute.

Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. At Eyematic he developed real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation [ cite news |work=Animation Magazine |title= Seal of Excellence Winners |url=http://www.animationmagazine.net/seal_of_excellence/seal_of_excellence_july_02.html ] . Neven Vision pioneered mobile visual search for camera phones [ cite news |work=Wired Magazine |title=Phones That Get in Your Face |url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/start.html?pg=12] [ cite news |work=The Feature |title=Hyperlinking the World |url=http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/101341.html] and was acquired by Google in 2006 [ cite news |work=The New York Times |title=The Route From Research to Start-Up|url= http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/business/18edge.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/F/Flanigan,%20James&oref=slogin ] . Today he manages a team responsible for advancing Google’s object and face recognition technologies [cite news |work=USA Today |title=Google can sort digital photos on face value |url=http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-09-16-picasa-google_N.htm ] .

Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software [ [http://www.frvt.org/ Face Recognition Vendor Test ] ] .

Recently Neven started to explore the application of quantum computing to hard combinatorial problems arising in machine learning. In collaboration with D-Wave he developed the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms [ [http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.4457 Image recognition with an adiabatic quantum computer] ] . It was demonstrated at SuperComputing07 [ cite news |work=CNET|title=D-Wave's quantum computer ready for latest demo |url=http://www.news.com/D-Waves-quantum-computer-ready-for-latest-demo/2100-1010_3-6217842.html ] . Critics maintain however that the chip employed in the demonstration may not be a fully coherent quantum computer.

References