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

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

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 tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

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 (, UNIPD) is an Italian public research university in Padua, Italy. It was founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers from the University of Bologna, who previously settled in Vicenza; thus, it is the second-oldest ...

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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

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.Pietro Perona
at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. it contained information on 300,152 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a typical mathematicia ...

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 research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. 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 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 dataset) for which he was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize 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 is an annual conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. Affiliations The conference was first held in 1983 in Washington, DC, organized by Takeo Kanade and Dana H. Ballard. Fr ...

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'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

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 500 public radio stations. ''SciFri'' is hosted by science ...

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

, and the

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

. 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 vision researchers Machine learning researchers 1961 births