Dhruv Batra's Project Featured in VT News

When

of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering travels in September to Zurich for the 2014 European Conference on Computer Vision, he will be a rising star in the growing field of vision and pattern recognition in computers. The assistant professor with Virginia Tech’s

previously co-led a tutorial in the research field at another industry conference in Ohio this past June. On his way to Zurich, Batra will give talks on the same subject -- creating software programs that help computers “see” and understand photographs just as humans can – at software giant Microsoft’s research lab at Cambridge University and then a separate event at Oxford University, both in the United Kingdom.

The travel comes on the heels of Batra’s spring acceptance of three major federal research grants worth than more a combined $1 million: A National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigators Award, and an U.S. Office of Naval Research grant. The awards -- valued at $500,000 for five years for the CAREER Award, $150,000 for three years from the Army, and $360,000 for three years from the Navy, all focus on machine learning and computer vision -- creating algorithms and techniques that will teach computers to better understand photographic images, and quickly so.