The Department is delighted to announce that James Hays will be appointed Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science effective July 1, 2013. The University’s endowed assistant professorships recognize the achievements of promising junior faculty members.
“I am honored to be named a Manning assistant professor. This endowed position will help support new research directions for me and my students,” said Hays.
Hays’ research interests span computer graphics, computer vision, and computational photography. His research focuses on using "Internet-scale" data and crowd-sourcing to improve scene understanding and allow smarter image synthesis. Examples of recent research projects include: recognizing human sketched objects by learning from crowdsourced training data, restoring blurry photographs by modeling natural image statistics, and localizing photographs by predicting their overhead appearance and searching satellite imagery.
Professor John Hughes stated, “James Hays has been doing really exciting work in both computational photography and at the boundary between computer graphics and computer vision, on areas as diverse as determine the age of color images, writing a program that can recognize human sketches (think "Pictionary"), and learning to determine image attributes like "indoors" or "manmade" or "socializing”. At the same time, James has developed courses in these areas that have energized students and led to multiple publications for them in top-rate venues. He's really the model of a Brown professor, balancing teaching, research, and service, and he's the ideal choice for the Manning Assistant Professorship.”
