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MALIBU, Calif., October 15, 2008—HRL researcher Shinko Cheng was recognized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" (IEEE) Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) with its "Best PhD Dissertation Award" at the society's annual meeting in China.
The dissertation, titled “A General Probabilistic Framework for Volumetric Articulated Body Pose Estimation and Drive Gesture, Activity and Intent Analysis for Human-Centric Driver Assistance,” was written for Cheng's doctorate degree in electrical engineering from the University of California San Diego, where he studied in the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory. In the dissertation, Cheng investigates technologies that enable intelligent systems to recognize human gestures and discusses systems that can automatically recover human pose and gesture information to improve the safety and comfort of automobiles.
A researcher in HRL's Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory, Cheng began at the company in 2007 fresh out of graduate school. “HRL has a very supportive environment with a strong emphasis in automotive safety, computer vision research, and research in general,” he said. “I was also looking forward to learning the ways of professional industrial research and development.”
For the last year Cheng has been working on HRL's SwarmVisionTM technology, a particle-swarm-based object detection algorithm and related applications for automobiles and aircraft.
Each year the ITSS gives out the Best PhD Dissertation Award to young engineers and scientists. Dissertations are judged on whether they combine theory and practice, make in-depth technical contributions, are interdisciplinary in nature, and have the potential to broaden the intelligent transportation topic areas from the methodological or application perspectives.
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HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California (www.hrl.com) is a corporate research-and-development laboratory owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors specializing in research into sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, applied electromagnetics, and microelectronics. HRL provides custom research and development and performs additional R&D contract services for its LLC member companies, the U.S. government, and other commercial companies.
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