Seminar Series: Technology Trends 2004
Alex Zelinsky
Alex Zelinsky is Director of the CSIRO ICT Centre.
He is a well-known scientist, specialising in robotics and computer
vision. Widely recognised as an important innovator in human-machine
interaction, Alex headed Seeing Machines, a company dedicated to the
commercialisation of intelligent vision systems, before joining
CSIRO in April 2004.
Zelinsky's interest in high technology and robotics took him to
Japan where he worked as a Research Scientist at the MITI
Electrotechnical Laboratory (1992-1995) - a lab with strong ties to
industry and leading commercial giants within Japan. During his time
in there, Zelinsky developed a strong interest in computer vision
for application in robotics. He worked closely with Japanese
colleagues to develop and implement real-time vision algorithms
initially in hardware, and then in software on standard desktop
computers. In early 1995 Zelinsky returned to Australia to start a
comprehensive research program in vision based robots. He built
robots that could autonomously navigate in cluttered dynamic
environments; cooperating robots that could clean rooms together,
and robots that could understand human gestures and intention. These
vision guided robot experiments gained significant international
recognition and are now regarded as landmark results in the field.
This work was primarily done at the Australian National University
in the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering where
in January 2000 Zelinsky was appointed as Professor and Head of the
Department of Systems Engineering.
Zelinsky's high impact work has earned notice from the
international community. He received several millions of dollars of
research grants through the Real World Computing Consortium (Japan),
Volvo Technology (Sweden) and the Australian Research Council. He
has been invited to the Editorial Boards of the leading journals and
magazines, as well as the program committees of the leading
international conferences in robotics. In recent years Zelinsky has
been regularly invited as a Keynote speaker at major technical
conferences and meetings.
In the late 1990's Zelinsky recognised that the mass deployment
of robots in the real-world applications was limited by the lack of
robustness in the technology and insufficient focus on end user
applications. In 1997 he organised the first International
Conference on Field and Service Robotics, this conference series is
now recognised as one of the pre-eminent conferences in the robotics
field. He also refocused his research projects to
application-oriented work, particularly in face and eye gaze
tracking systems, and smart car technology. Zelinsky understood that
the next revolution in human-machine interfaces would be natural
machine interfaces that are based on understanding body language,
and not solely relying on the traditional mouse and keyboard.
Zelinsky could see that automobiles would one day evolve into
autonomous robots. This transformation would not be an overnight
process - instead, a gradual transformation would occur.
Zelinsky began the development of faceLAB in late 1996. Several
research versions of faceLAB were developed during the 90's. Then in
July 2000, Zelinsky launched Seeing Machines Pty Limited, a
corporate evolution of research sponsored by the Australian National
University and Volvo Technology. The technology was immediately
hailed as a major advance in computing, with major potential driver
safety applications in the automotive industry. The first commercial
version of faceLAB was released in April 2001. Since this time
faceLAB has enjoyed considerable international sales success, and
Seeing Machines has become became established as a world leader in
the computer vision industry. The company is also recognized for
excellence in both technology and business.
Alex Zelinsky's contributions to science have been recognised by
numerous awards in Australia and internationally. These include the
Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (1999 and 2001), Australian
Eureka Science Prize (2002), US R&D magazine Top 100 Award
(2002). In December 2002 Zelinsky was elected as Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. In
October 2003 The Bulletin Magazine named Zelinsky in the annual
Smart 100 list of influential Australians. The World Economic Forum
has selected Zelinsky as a Technology Pioneer for the 2003 &
2004 Forums.
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