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 Full Professor of Computer Science at the City College  and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. 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

His research interests include 3D computer vision, human-computer interaction (HCI), augmented reality, video representations, and various applications in education, environment, robotics, surveillance and transportation. He has published over 100 technical papers in the related fields. His recent 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, multimodal (EO/IR/acoustic) moving target detection/identification, and online 3D virtualized classroom using image-based modeling/rendering, human tracking, and multi-modal information extraction for advanced e-learning.

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 video computing, video presentations and human-computer interaction using computer vision, supported by NSF, AFRL, ARO, NYSIA, CUNY CISDD and CUNY Research Foundation. 

Dr. Zhu is the recipient of CUNY "Certificate of Recognition" in 2004, 2005 and 2006, "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, and a 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 and an Associate Editor of the Machine Vision and Applications Journal. He is 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 the up-coming Special Issue on Modeling and Representations of Large Scale 3D Scenes, International Journal of Computer Vision.


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