Pietro Perona (born 3 September 1961) is an Italian-American educator and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and

Computation and Neural Systems The Computation and Neural Systems (CNS) program was established at the California Institute of Technology in 1986 with the goal of training Ph.D. students interested in exploring the relationship between the structure of neuron-like circuits/networ ...

at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group.

Academic biography

Perona obtained his D.Eng. in electrical engineering ''cum laude'' from the

University of Padua The University of Padua ( it, Università degli Studi di Padova, UNIPD) is an Italian university located in the city of Padua, region of Veneto, northern Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from ...

in 1985 and completed his Ph.D. at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1990.Pietro Perona
at th
Caltech directory
/ref> His dissertation was titled ''Finding Texture and Brightness Boundaries in Images'', and his adviser was

Jitendra Malik Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision. Academic biograph ...

.Pietro Perona
at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

In 1990, Perona was a postdoctoral fellow at the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

at Berkeley. From 1990 to 1991, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

in the

Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications, control, and signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering ...

. He has been on the faculty of the

since 1991, and he was named Allan E. Puckett Professor in 2008.

Research

Perona’s research focuses on the computational aspects of vision and learning. He developed the anisotropic diffusion equation, a partial differential equation that reduces noise in images while enhancing region boundaries. He is currently interested in visual recognition and in visual analysis of behavior. Perona and

Serge Belongie Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of thDanish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence Previously, he was the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Computer Sci ...

lead the Visipedia project, which facilitates research on visual knowledge representation, visual search, and human-in-the-loop machine learning systems. Perona pioneered the study of visual categorization (including the publication of the

Caltech 101 Caltech 101 is a data set of digital images created in September 2003 and compiled by Fei-Fei Li, Marco Andreetto, Marc 'Aurelio Ranzato and Pietro Perona at the California Institute of Technology. It is intended to facilitate Computer Vision re ...

dataset) for which he was awarded the

Longuet-Higgins Prize The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is an annual conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, which is regarded as one of the most important conferences in its field. According to Google Scholar Metrics (2022 ...

in 2013. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision, the 2003

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is an annual conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, which is regarded as one of the most important conferences in its field. According to Google Scholar Metrics (2022 ...

best paper award, and a 1996 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Media coverage

Perona has been quoted or had his research featured in various national media outlets, including the

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

Science Friday ''Science Friday'' (known as ''SciFri'' for short) is a weekly call-in talk show that broadcasts each Friday on public radio stations, distributed by WNYC Studios, and carried on over 400 public radio stations. ''SciFri'' is hosted by award-wi ...

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issue ...

, and the

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...

. In 2003, Perona and Stephen Nowlin organized the NEURO art exhibition, which brought together contemporary artists and scientists to explore neuromorphic engineering.

References

External links

Pietro Perona professional home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Perona, Pietro Living people University of Padua alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni California Institute of Technology faculty Italian computer scientists American computer scientists Computer scientists Computer vision researchers Machine learning researchers 1961 births