DoC Professor wins the BCS Roger Needham Award

Professor Maja Pantic here in the Department of Computing is this years winner of the BCS Roger Needham Award.

Professor Maja Pantic here in the Department of Computing is this years winner of the BCS Roger Needham Award. The award is made annually for a distinguished research contribution in computer science made by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD.

Maja is one of the world’s leading experts in the research on machine understanding of human behavior including vision-based detection, tracking, and analysis of human behavioral cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviors like laughter, social signals, and affective states. She is also one of the pioneers in design and development of fully automatic, affect-sensitive human-centered anticipatory interfaces, built for humans based on human models. She has published more than 100 technical papers in the areas of machine analysis of facial expressions and emotions, machine analysis of human body gestures, and human-computer interaction. She has more than 3000 citations to her work and has more than 25 popular press articles (including New Scientist, BBC Radio, and NL TV 1 and 3), is a Senior member of the IEEE and a member of the IEEE SMC Board of Govenors , she has served as the Key Note Speaker and an organization/ program committee member at numerous conferences.

More information about Maja's research can be found at http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/home. The award is certainly a just recognition for her outstanding work and is truly deserved - well done Maja.

The award was established in memory of the late Professor Roger Needham. Sponsored by Microsoft Research, this award is administered by the Awards Committee of the BCS Academy of Computing.

In addition to receiving the prestigious award, Maja will have the opportunity to give a public lecture on her work and will also be asked to contribute an article describing her work in terms accessible to a general audience for publication in ITNOW, the BCS magazine.