David Jacobs
Dr. David W. Jacobs is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in the University's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He is also currently the Director of the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning. From 1985 to 1992 he attended M.I.T., where he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science. From 1992 to 2002 he was a Research Scientist and then a Senior Research Scientist at the NEC Research Institute. In 2002, he joined the CS department at the University of Maryland.
Dr. Jacobs' research has focused on computer vision, especially in the area of object recognition. He has also published articles in the areas of perceptual organization, motion understanding, memory and learning, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and computational geometry. He has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE PAMI an Area Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding, and as Program co-Chair for CVPR. He and his co-authors received honorable mention for the best paper award at CVPR 2000. He also co-authored a paper that received the best student paper award at UIST 2003, and he and his co-authors received the best paper award in Eurographics 2016. Dr. Jacobs and his collaborators have been awarded the 2011 Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award for the development of Leafsnap, an app for tree species identification that has been downloaded over 1.5 million times and widely used in education and biodiversity studies.