Dr. Rakesh (Teddy) Kumar

Title:

Senior Technical Director, Vision and Robots

What is your focus at Sarnoff?

I lead a laboratory of 3 R&D groups, focused on aerial video surveillance, robotics, 3D modeling and automobile applications. I am involved in directing and performing commercial and government research and development projects in the areas of visual navigation, video surveillance and monitoring, video and 3D exploitation and analysis, object recognition, immersive tele-presence, simulation and training, 3D modeling, robotics and automobile applications, medical image analysis and multi-sensor registration.

Describe a typical day for you at Sarnoff.

My day can be divided into 4 types of activities:

1. Working on current on-going projects. I am typically involved in a weekly review meeting for many of the projects under me. We go over results, brainstorm approaches to current problems and refine schedule.
2. Developing new concepts, marketing presentations and proposals for customers. I work with the business development and contracts staff and principal investigators to develop marketing presentations and proposals for different customers.
3. Often, I need to meet with new prospective or current customers and discuss new opportunities and current on-going work. Sometimes this means going to sites where we are doing a deployment or demonstration or to the customer’s office.
4. Finally, I am involved in management meetings, where we go over operations and finances. Periodically, I meet with staff to discuss personnel issues.

What experience did you have prior to joining Sarnoff?

I worked at IBM to develop machine vision based inspection modules for high density semiconductor packages used in Super Computers. I have been at Sarnoff since 1993.

What is your background in academics?

PhD in Computer Science (focus on Computer Vision) from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1992

MS in Computer Engineering from SUNY, Buffalo

B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, India

Why did you choose Sarnoff?

Sarnoff is world leading R&D center for Computer Vision and is renowned for the development of innovative real-time vision applications. Sarnoff offers the opportunity to do cutting edge research in computer vision and also the opportunity to transition the technology from research to deployment and products. Being an R&D center, we get to develop computer vision applications for a wide variety of fields and interact with various types of customers, ranging from DOD and intelligence personnel, movie and game makers, car manufacturers, medical doctors, etc.

What is your proudest professional achievement?

Leading the development of the Video Flashlight and Security technology. Video Flashlight is a system for remote immersive monitoring of an urban site using a blanket of video cameras. The guard monitors the world using a live 3D model, which is constantly being updated from different directions using the multiple video streams (Video Flashlights™). The guard can monitor the world from a birds eye view or fly down and zoom into observe an activity of interest. Video based alarms, tracks of detected moving and left behind objects are overlaid on the model, which can be visualized from any virtual viewpoint.

We initially conceived of the technology under Sarnoff investment and DARPA R&D projects. The initial projects were demonstration projects, where the system was dismantled after the exercise. The demonstrations however were quite compelling and this led to projects, which required us to leave behind working systems at various airports and government/ commercial facilities. Sarnoff also decided to productize the technology and created a spin-in product arm called SSG (Security and Surveillance Group). Finally, L-3 purchased the technology from Sarnoff.

The professional achievement was to oversee the technology development process from concept creation to development and demonstration and then transition to products and finally sale. It is great to fly out of an airport and point out to one’s kids that the security technology deployed there is based on the efforts of their dad and his colleagues.

I am also proud to lead a large group of talented and creative researchers and engineers and oversee technical development over a diverse set of research problems and applications.