Takeo Kanade is the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position there, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. He also founded and directed the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo from 2001 to 2010, and the Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon from 2006 to 2012.

Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics and sensors, producing more than 400 technical papers and more than 20 patents. The most notable advanced intelligent robotics and vision technologies whose origin and major development are often attributed to Dr. Kanade include: face recognition for which he developed one of the earliest systems in the early 70’s, followed by a series of pioneering work on face detection, alignment, and expression analysis; the Lucas-Kanade tracking algorithm that is the basis of today’s video motion analysis including video encoding; driverless car for which his Navlab project accomplished the “No Hands Across America” demonstration in 1995 traveling more than 4000km by vision-based autonomous driving; and multi-camera technology that uses a large number of cameras for stereo, scene modeling, and entertainment for which his EyeVision system, a movie Matrix-like replay system used in the broadcast of Super Bowl IIIV , which set the trend we see today.

Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Awards he received include the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, ACM/AAAI Newell Award, Okawa Award, NEC Computer and Communication Award, Tateishi Grand Prize, Joseph Engelberger Award, Funai Accomplishment Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and IEEE PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award.