David J. Crandall
Assistant Professor
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University

227 Informatics West, 901 E Tenth St
Bloomington, IN 47408
djcran@indiana.edu
 

Research

I work in computer vision, the area of computer science concerned with automatically inferring semantic meaning from images -- teaching computers to "see." More generally, I am interested in problems that involve analyzing and modeling large amounts of uncertain data, like mining data from social networking websites.

I joined the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in Fall 2010. I'm on the faculty of the Computer Science, Informatics, and Cognitive Science programs.

As a graduate student and postdoc in Computer Science at Cornell University, I worked with Professor Dan Huttenlocher on statistical part-based object recognition algorithms. I also worked with Professor Jon Kleinberg on modeling and mining data from online social networks. I completed the Ph.D. degree in August 2008.

Before Cornell, I spent two years in the research labs of Eastman Kodak Company. There I worked mostly on image understanding and enhancement algorithms for both consumer and medical images.

As an undergraduate and Masters student at Penn State University, I worked with Professor Rangachar Kasturi on content-based video indexing. We worked mostly on detecting, tracking and recognizing text in video (both captions and text appearing naturally in a scene).

Selected publications
3-d reconstruction
  • –  "Discrete-Continuous Optimization for Large-Scale Structure from Motion," in CVPR 2011 (with A. Owens, N. Snavely, D. Huttenlocher) [pdf] [project website] Runner-up best paper!

Object recognition
  • –  "Discovering localized attributes for fine-grained recognition," in CVPR 2012 (with K. Duan, D. Parikh, K. Grauman) [pdf] [project website]

  • –  "A Multi-layer Composite Model for Human Pose Estimation," in BMVC 2012 (with K. Duan, D. Batra)
    [pdf] [project website]

  • –  "Landmark classification in large-scale image collections," in ICCV 2009 (with Y. Li and D. Huttenlocher) [pdf]

  • –  "Composite models of objects and scenes for category recognition," in CVPR 2007 (with D. Huttenlocher) [pdf]

  • –  "Weakly-supervised learning of part-based spatial models for visual object recognition," in ECCV 2006 (with D. Huttenlocher) [pdf] [source code]

  • –  "Robust Color Object Detection using Spatial-Color Joint Probability Functions," in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2006 (with J. Luo) [CVPR 2004 version]
  • –  "Part-based statistical models for visual object class recognition," 2008 (Ph.D. thesis) [pdf]

Modeling online social networks
  • –  "Inferring Social Ties from Geographic Coincidences," in Proc. National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 8 December 2010 (with L. Backstrom, D. Cosley, S. Suri, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg) [pdf]

  • –  "Feedback Effects between Similarity and Social Influence in Online Communities," in KDD 2008 (with D. Cosley, J. Kleinberg, D. Huttenlocher, S. Suri) [pdf]

Mining online social media
  • –  "Mining photo-sharing websites to study ecological phenomena," in WWW 2012 (with H. Zhang, M. Korayem, G. LeBuhn) [pdf] [project website]

  • –  "Beyond co-occurrence: Discovering and visualizing tag relationships from geo-spatial and temporal similarities," in WSDM 2012 (with H. Zhang, M. Korayem, E. You) [pdf] [project website]

Content-based video indexing

Human perception
  • –  "Psychophysical study of image orientation perception," in Spatial Vision, 2003, pp. 429-457. (with J. Luo, A. Singhal, M. Boutell and R. Gray.)
My complete list of publications is also available.

Teaching

 I'm teaching Info I427, Search Informatics, in Fall 2012. Students learn about information retrieval and web search, and build their own search engines as the course project.

Past courses:

  • –  Taught I427, Search Informatics (Fall 2011, Spring 2011)
  • –  Taught CS B657, Computer Vision, (Spring 2012, Fall 2010)
  • –  Taught INFO 2950, Mathematical Methods for Information Science, Fall 2008 (at Cornell)
  • –  Taught CS 113, Introduction to C, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 (at Cornell)
  • –  Taught CS 211, Algorithms and Data Structures in Java, Summer 2007 (at Cornell)
  • –  T.A. for CS 664, Computer Vision, Fall 2003 (at Cornell)
  • –  Taught CSE 275, Digital Design Lab, Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 (at Penn State)

Other projects

 These are other projects I've worked on that were never polished enough to be publishable, but that someone somewhere might still find interesting. :-)

Fun interests

 During the summer, my main obsession is cycling. I ride for fun only, and I have no delusions that I'm actually any good. Recent trips include Ithaca to Lake Erie (250 miles), Ithaca to State College (200 miles), and around Cayuga Lake (85 miles). I like to ski during the winter (aka the majority of the year in upstate New York), although I'm even worse at that.

I'm on a perpetual quest to become fluent in Spanish. In addition to taking classes in high school and throughout college and graduate school, I've studied abroad in Spain and Mexico, and I've also traveled to Puerto Rico and El Salvador. Despite all that effort, my Spanish is still remarkably lousy. :)

For the last few years I have volunteered as an income tax return preparer at Alternatives Federal Credit Union. Believe it or not, it's surprisingly fun.