Zhigang Zhu received his B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees, all in computer science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1988, 1991 and 1997 respectively.

Dr. Zhu is currently a Herbert G. Kayser Professor of Computer Science, at The City College of New York and The CUNY Graduate Center. He is Director of  the City College Visual Computing Laboratory (CcvcL), and Co-Director of  the Center for Perceptual Robotics, Intelligent Sensors and Machines (PRISM) at CCNY. Previously he has been an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. From 1997 to 1999 he was Director of the Information Processing and Application Division in the Computer Science Department at Tsinghua University

Dr. Zhu's research expertise spans the areas of 3D computer vision, human-computer interaction (HCI), augmented reality, video representations, multimodal sensing and processing, and various applications in education, environment, robotics, surveillance, transportation, security inspection, art analysis and assistive technologies. He has published over 130 technical papers in the related fields. His major research activities include: an integrated visual navigation approach with panoramic, omnidirectional and stereo vision sensors; new 3D layered representations for image-based rendering and robot navigation; novel algorithms and systems of stereo mosaics for airborne video surveillance; view planning with heterogeneous visual sensors for distributed and cooperative robots, and most recently multimodal (EO/IR/acoustic) moving target detection/identification, adaptive multimodal sensor designs, and wearable sensing and display systems for blind and visually impaired people.

At Tsinghua University, he had conducted more than seven NSF, High Tech and Advanced Research projects in China as PI or CO-PI. At UMass he was involved in several DARPA, NSF and other projects, including NSF environmental monitoring using aerial images and videos, DARPA ITO Mobile Autonomous Robot S/W (MARS) and Software for Distributed Robotics (SDR), DARPA SAFER project, the Kollmorgen high-resolution panoramic sensing project, and an Under Vehicle Inspection System (UVIS). Currently he is mainly working with various research issues and applications of computer vision and multimodal sensing, supported by AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, DARPA, NCIIA, NSF, NYSIA, CCNY President's City Seeds Award, GSOE Dean's Award, CUNY CISDD, CUNY Research Foundation as well as industry.

In 2012 Dr. Zhu is named the Herbert G. Kayser Chair Professor of Computer Science, a distinction "in recognition of his outstanding achievement as a faculty member in the Grove School of Engineering" at The City College of New York. In May 2013 Professor Zhigang Zhu received President's Award for Excellence, The City College of New York, in the inaugural year of the President's Awards. Here was the citation for the award from City College President: "Zhigang Zhu - Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering - was recognized by both students and colleagues for his sustained commitment to scholarly work, his multidisciplinary research in Assistive Technologies for the Blind, his effective integration of research innovation and undergraduate teaching, his engagement of underrepresented students in research and education, and his creation of innovative learning opportunities for students outside the classroom."

He is the recipient of CUNY "Certificate of Recognition" yearly from 2004 to now, "Science and Technology Achievement Award" (second prize winner) from Ministry of Electronic Industry China in 1996, "Outstanding Young Teacher in Beijing" in 1997, and "C. C. Lin Applied Mathematics Scholarship" (first prize winner) at Tsinghua in 1997. His Ph.D. thesis " On Environment Modeling for Visual Navigation" was selected in 1999 as a special award in the top 100 dissertations in China over the last three years, and a book based on his Ph.D. thesis was published by China Higher Education Press in December 2001.

He has served as a program committee member of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference from 1999 to 2003, and as a Session Chair of the 1999 International Workshop on Digital and Computational Video, Tampa, Florida, Program Co-Chair of the IEEE International Workshop on Image and Video Registration (with CVPR'04), July 2, 2004 in Washington DC. He has reviewed numerous papers for various international journals and conferences. He is a senior member of the IEEE, a senior member of the ACM, an Associate Editor of the Machine Vision and Applications Journal (2006 - now), Technical Editor, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (09/2010 - now), and on Editorial Board of ISRN Machine Vision, Hindawi Publishing Corporation (07/2011 - now). He is Co-General Chair of the 2013 IEEE/NSF Workshop on Multimodal and Alternative Perception for Visually Impaired People (MAP4VIP) July 15th, 2013, San Jose, USA ,  Co-General Chair (with Prof. Thomas S. Huang) of the 2007 IEEE Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing, in conjunction with CVPR 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Co-Guest Editor (with Prof. Takeo Kanade) of Special Issue on Modeling and Representations of Large Scale 3D Scenes, International Journal of Computer Vision.


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