David J. Crandall
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University

4139 Upson Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
crandall@cs.cornell.edu
 

Research

I work in computer vision, the area of computer science concerned with automatically inferring semantic meaning from images. I am also interested in other problems that involve modeling and analyzing large amounts of uncertain data. For example, I have been studying how large-scale online social networks evolve over time.

As a graduate student at Cornell, I worked with Professor Dan Huttenlocher on statistical part-based object recognition algorithms. I completed the Ph.D. degree in August 2008.

Before coming to Cornell, I spent two years in the research labs of Eastman Kodak Company. There I worked mostly on smart image enhancement and understanding algorithms for consumer and medical images. You can try some of this technology by using Kodak PerfectTouch processing the next time you develop film or print digital photos on-line.

As an undergraduate and Masters student at Penn State University, I worked with Professor Rangachar Kasturi on content-based video indexing. We worked mostly on detecting, tracking and recognizing text in video (both captions and text appearing naturally in a scene).

Selected publications
Spatial embedding of visual information

Data mining in social networks
  • –  "Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities," in KDD 2008 (with D. Cosley, J. Kleinberg, D. Huttenlocher, S. Suri) [pdf]

Object recognition
  • –  "Composite models of objects and scenes for category recognition," in CVPR 2007 (with D. Huttenlocher) [pdf]

  • –  "Weakly-supervised learning of part-based spatial models for visual object recognition," in ECCV 2006 (with D. Huttenlocher) [pdf] [source code]

  • –  "Robust Color Object Detection using Spatial-Color Joint Probability Functions," in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2006 (with J. Luo) [CVPR 2004 version]
  • –  "Part-based statistical models for visual object class recognition," 2008 (Ph.D. thesis) [pdf]

Content-based video indexing

Human perception
  • –  "Psychophysical study of image orientation perception," in Spatial Vision, 2003, pp. 429-457. (with J. Luo, A. Singhal, M. Boutell and R. Gray.)
My complete list of publications is also available.

Teaching
    Courses I have taught or T.A.'ed:
    • –  Taught INFO 2950, Mathematical Methods for Information Science, Fall 2008
    • –  Taught CS 113, Introduction to C, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008
    • –  Taught CS 211, Algorithms and Data Structures in Java, Summer 2007
    • –  T.A. for CS 664, Computer Vision, Fall 2003
    • –  Taught CSE 275, Digital Design Lab, Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 (at Penn State)

Other projects

 These are other projects I've worked on that were never polished enough to be publishable, but that someone somewhere might still find interesting. :-)

Fun interests

 During the summer, my main obsession is cycling. I ride for fun only, and I have no delusions that I'm actually any good. Recent trips include Ithaca to Lake Erie (250 miles), Ithaca to State College (200 miles), and around Cayuga Lake (85 miles). I like to ski during the winter (aka the majority of the year in upstate New York), although I'm even worse at that.

I'm on a perpetual quest to become fluent in Spanish. In addition to taking classes in high school and throughout college and graduate school, I've studied abroad in Spain and Mexico, and I've also traveled to Puerto Rico and El Salvador. Despite all that effort, my Spanish is still remarkably lousy. :)

For the last few years I have volunteered as an income tax return preparer at Alternatives Federal Credit Union.