Professor David Cooper Honored at CVPR Conference

David Cooper, Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Professor of Engineering (Research), was honored at the 25th International IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) which was held in Providence from June 18-20. This is the major annual meeting on CVPR. Professor Cooper was honored “In appreciation of his outstanding and pioneering contributions to Unsupervised Learning and Bayesian Inference in Computer Vision.” The international conference was held this year at the Convention Center with over 1800 attendees. Brown University Professor Benjamin Kimia served as one of three general co-chairs of the conference.

Ben Kimia, David Cooper, Rama Chellappa

Professor Cooper’s current research focuses on the development and application of new geometric, algebraic, and probabilistic approaches, models, and algorithms for recognizing and estimating 2D and 3D geometric information and functioning in 3D scenes from images, video, and range data.

Professor Cooper received both his Sc.B. and Sc.M. degrees from MIT in electrical engineering, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in applied mathematics. After graduation, he joined the Brown faculty in September of 1966 as an assistant professor. He became an associate professor in 1969, and was promoted to full professor in 1978. During his more than 45 years at Brown, Cooper has also served as cofounder and associate director of the Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems (LEMS) for more than 15 years, and the head of electrical engineering for two years. He is a fellow of the IEEE and has published roughly 140 papers in refereed journals or as book chapters.

For more information on the CVPR awards, please go to: http://www.cvpr2012.org/program-details/awards

Brown Engineer Nathanial Cooper ’12 Finishes Third at AIChE Competition

Students in the Brown chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to attend the national AiChE meeting and compete in a student poster competition.

In the environmental category, Nathanial Cooper ’12 won a third place award. His poster was entitled, “Agricultural Waste Based Bio-Char Sorption Potential”. Last year, Cooper finished second in the poster competition.

Four students represented Brown at this year’s competition, including: Henry Mattingly ’12 (supervisor Robert Hurt), William Trinh ’12 (supervisor Indrek Kulaots), Cooper (supervisor Indrek Kulaots), and Ellison Kandler ’13 (supervisors Steve Greenbaum of the City University of New York and Eric Suuberg).

“As I've attended these student conferences over many years, and I do carefully review most of these posters presented, I must say that this year was even beyond what I have seen before,” said Kulaots. “The competition has gotten more and more competitive every year, and the level of science presented by undergraduates is remarkable.”

Brown Engineers Finish First and Second at AIChE Competition

Students in the Brown chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to compete in a student poster competition. For the second consecutive year, a Brown engineer has returned to College Hill with a first place trophy.

Brown's biomedical engineering student, Melissa Tsang '11 brought home the first place trophy. Tsang competed in the materials engineering and sciences category among 46 participants divided into three groups. She conducted her project, entitled "Novel Polyurethane-Carbon Nanofiber Composite for Bladder Cancer Applications," in collaboration with Associate Professor Thomas Webster and Dr. YoungWook Chun, a Ph.D. candidate in Professor Webster's lab.

In the environmental category, Nattie Cooper '12 took home a second place award.

Melissa Tsang '11 at the center, BME 

Brown's other AIChE student poster competitors included: James Saraidaridis '11 (supervisor Professor Tayhas Palmore), Theresa Raimondo '11 (supervisors Associate Professor Anubhav Tripathi and graduate student Stephanie McCalla), Lakshmi Madhavan '11 (supervisor Professor J. M. Calo), David Sonshine '11 (supervisor Professor Robert Hurt), and Daniel Prendergast '11 (supervisors Professor Eric Suuberg and graduate student James Rice).

"Every year the competition gets more and more competitive than I have seen in previous years," said Indrek Kulaots, lecturer in Engineering.