David J. Crandall

Luddy Professor of Computer Science
Director, Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence
Grant Thornton Scholar
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University

Office: 3020 Luddy Center for AI
Lab address: 2001 Luddy Center for AI
Bloomington, IN 47408
djcran@indiana.edu
Office hours by appointment via Zoom

Curriculum vitaeBio sketchLab page

David Crandall photo

News
Oct 15, 2023: David is a Program Chair for ICDL 2024, a unique interdisciplinary conference on learning in machines and humans. Consider submitting! Deadline is Dec. 15.
Oct 1, 2023: David is a Program Chair for CVPR 2024, the premier annual computer vision conference. Paper registration deadline is Nov 3.
July 12, 2023: We're excited to present our IRIS social robot at the United Nations AI for Good Summit in Geneva!
July 5, 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Sam Goree for passing his dissertation defense!
May 1, 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Weslie Khoo for receiving a prestigious USDA postdoc fellowship!
Apr 4, 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Zehua Zhang for passing his dissertation defense!
Mar 20, 2023: New $4.4 million award to continue workforce development and research into trusted AI.
Dec 14, 2023: David named a Distinguished Member of the ACM.
Sept 1, 2022: David is very honored to be named inaugural director of the Luddy AI Center.
June 17, 2022: We're delighted to be part of the Ego4D Consortium to collect the next generation egocentric dataset. Check out our paper at CVPR!
July 29, 2021: We're very pleased to be part of the new $20 million NSF AI Institute on Engaged Learning!
July 25, 2021: Three papers at CogSci using cameras to study child behavior: detecting joint attention, predicting whether a new object name will be learned, and modeling verb learning.
July 1, 2021: David is named a Luddy Professor.
June 30, 2021: Congratulations and a fond farewell to Dr. Md Alimoor Reza, who is joining Drake University as an Assistant Professor!
June 21, 2021: We're very excited to present our (quite unusual) CVPR 2021 paper that investigates how vision researchers feel about changes in the field. Also check out the video!
June 1, 2021: New $2.1 million award to collaborate with IU colleagues, Notre Dame, IUPUI, and the U.S. Navy on Trusted AI.
Apr 1, 2021: Consider submitting a paper to our IJCAI workshop on Deep Learning, Case-Based Reasoning, and AutoML: Present and Future Synergies
Mar 4, 2021: Congratulations to Dr. Eman Hassan on passing her dissertation defense!
Jan 28, 2021: Congratulations to Dr. Bardia Doosti on passing his dissertation defense!
Jan 3, 2021: We're presenting two interesting papers at WACV 2021 this week on recognizing people based on egocentric hand gestures, and part-based segmentation of novel objects
Oct 23, 2020: New NSF grant to plan a Midwest AI Institute on Rural Health, Wellness, and Resilience.
Jun 20, 2020: Check out our CVPR 2020 papers on hand/object pose estimation, video object segmentation, and color harmony modeling.
May 1, 2020: Some of our work on studying the evolution of the web is featured in The Conversation!
Mar 30, 2020: Congratulations to Sam Goree for winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
Mar 3, 2020: Thanks to Google for a Faculty Research Award!
Jan 21, 2020: Congratulations to Dr. Mingze Xu on a successful PhD defense!
Oct 1, 2019: New grant from Office of Naval Research on explainable machine learning, in collaboration with Prof. David Leake.
Sept 27, 2019: David will speak about computer vision research at IU Research Unplugged, celebrating IU's 200th anniversary.
Aug 1, 2019: New grant from NSF with Linda Smith and Chen Yu, "Visual category learning by toddlers provides new principles for teaching rapid generalization."
June 27, 2019: New contract to collaborate with Dzyne on satellite image analysis.
May 1, 2019: New contract to collaborate with ETRI on depth map prediction using deep learning.
Apr 9, 2019: Congratulations to Katie Spoon for an IU Provost's Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research, an NCWIT Award, and an NSF GRF! Check out her research project.
Jan 25, 2019: Congratulations to Dr. Chenyou Fan on a successful PhD defense!
Jan 15, 2019: David is pleased to be named a Grant Thornton Scholar for 2019-2020.
Oct 29, 2018: Thanks to all who participated in OurCS (aka HelloResearch) this weekend; we had a great time working with such talented students! More info in our SIGCSE 2019 paper.
Sep 12, 2018: We're looking for new faculty in Machine Learning, especially those who are broadly interested in potential connections with human learning. Consider applying!
Aug 13, 2018: Welcome to new postdoc Md Alimoor Reza!
Jul 19, 2018: Congratulations Dr. Jangwon Lee for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis!
May 30, 2018: New contract with Purdue and the Indiana Innovation Institute on computer vision to help protect the microelectronics supply chain.
Apr 3, 2018: Congratulations to lab intern Abraham Oliver on winning best 12th grade project at the Indiana State Science Fair!
Mar 29, 2018: Congratulations to Dr. Tian (Linger) Xu on a successful PhD defense!
Feb 15, 2018: Co-organizing Third ICWSM workshop on The Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring. Please consider submitting!
Jan 24, 2018: New contract from NASA on quantifying lymphatic function using computer vision, with Dawn Kernagis (IHMC) and Eva Sevick (TMC).
Dec 5, 2017: Co-organizing second CVPR workshop on The Bright and Dark Sides of Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities for Privacy and Security. Consider submitting a paper!
Nov 1, 2017: We have openings for postdoc researchers -- please contact David for more information!
Oct 20, 2017: Two fun remote sensing papers: 3d reconstruction of ice bed surfaces (at ICIP) and combining ground and satellite images to make maps (at ICCV).
Sep 1, 2017: Thanks to Google for sponsoring a new project investigating the limits of current computer vision technology.
Aug 23, 2017: IU is hiring faculty in the general area of Machine and Human Learning. Consider applying!
Jul 22, 2017: Check out our CVPR paper on associating wearable (egocentric) video with third-person video!
Jul 21, 2018: Congratulations to Jangwon Lee and Michael Ryoo for winning Best Paper at the CVPR Deep Learning for Robotic Vision Workshop.
Jun 26, 2017: How has visual design on the web changed over time? Two new papers use expert surveys and computer vision to help find out.
Jun 10, 2017: How can developmental psychology inform computer vision, and vice-versa? Check out the talks from our Workshop on Egocentric Vision: From Science to Real-World Applications.
May 20, 2017: I'm very honored for the IU Trustees Teaching Award. But the credit goes to great IU students who make teaching fun -- thanks everyone!
Apr 28, 2017: Congratulations to Dr. Jeff Johnson on a successful proposal defense!
Mar 20, 2017: Co-organizing WebSci workshop on The Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring. Deadline is May 1. Please consider submitting!
Feb 15, 2017: Co-organizing CVPR workshop on The Bright and Dark Sides of Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities for Privacy and Security. Consider submitting a paper or abstract!
Jan 11, 2017: Very excited to lead the CS part of a new $2.5 million award to study interdisciplinary connections between human and machine learning!
Dec 15, 2016: Co-editing special issue on Egocentric Vision and Lifelogging Tools in the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. Please consider submitting a manuscript!
Dec 7, 2016: Check out our NIPS 2016 paper on training diverse networks using multiple choice learning.
Oct 15, 2016: Robert Pless and I are CVPR 2017 tutorial co-chairs. Please consider submitting a proposal!
Oct 8, 2016: Could wearable cameras narrate our lives? Our "DeepDiary" paper at ECCV EPIC is a first step.
Aug 22, 2016: Best paper award at ICDL-Epirob 2016 on wearable cameras to study infant word learning, with Sven Bambach and Profs. Linda Smith and Chen Yu.
Aug 10, 2016: What may machine learning reveal about infant learning? Check out ourCogSci 2016 paper!
Aug 22, 2016: Congratulations to Dr. Sven Bambach on successfully defending his dissertation to earn two PhDs, in Computer Science and Cognitive Science!
Jul 30, 2016: We've moved! Come visit our new lab (and my new office) at 611 N Park Ave (one block west of Informatics West).
Jul 20, 2016: Congratulations to Dr. Stefan Lee on his dissertation defense!
Jul 13, 2016: New contract to collaborate with NSWC Crane on analyzing images of microelectronic devices!
Jul 1, 2016: Promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure).
Jun 27, 2016: Interested in improving diversity of your deep networks? Check out this talk by my student Stefan Lee at a CVPR tutorial.
May 26, 2016: Grant from the IU Social Science Research Commons to investigate applications of computer vision to geography, with Prof. Tom Evans. Thanks SSRC!!
Mar 29, 2016: Congratulations to senior Ben Newman on winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
Feb 12, 2016: Our new CHI 2016 paper on detecting computer screens to enhance lifelogger privacy is a CHI best paper honorable mention!
Jan 15, 2016: I'm co-organizing an International Workshop on the Social Web for Environmental and Ecological Monitoring at ICWSM 2016. Short and long papers due Feb 20. Consider submitting!
Sept 15, 2015: New ICCV 2015 paper, website, and dataset on hand recognition in first person video. Check out the video spotlight!
Aug 1, 2015: Welcome to new IU faculty member Prof. Michael Ryoo! Check out his interesting work on vision and robotics.
May 26, 2015: Congratulations Dr. Mohammed Korayem on a successful dissertation defense!
Apr 20, 2015: ICCP paper on mining architectural elements in Google Street View. Check out the demo!
Apr 15, 2015: Two CHI papers on privacy challenges and opportunities of wearable cameras
Jan 1, 2015: Recent and upcoming papers: WACV paper on geo-informative attributes, Signal Processing article on pose recognition, ICIP paper on ice layer detection
Dec 18, 2014: New NSF grant to study privacy in first-person cameras, with Apu Kapadia and Denise Anthony. Check out the video!
Oct 28, 2014: New NSF grant to help build high-performance computing libraries for computer vision and other applications (with G. Fox, J. Qiu, and others)
Sep 8, 2014: Looking for a faculty job? Our school is hiring in Interactive and Intelligent Systems (as well as several other areas).
Aug 22, 2014: Congratulations Dr. Haipeng Zhang on a successful dissertation defense!
Aug 6, 2014: Check out our redesigned lab website, including a nice new overview of our projects!
Jul 21, 2014: Congratulations Dr. Kun Duan on a successful dissertation defense!
Jun 28, 2014: Best paper award at CVPR Workshop on Egocentric Vision
Feb 18, 2014: Google Research Award to study privacy in first-person cameras, with Apu Kapadia
Feb 8, 2014: Our EMBO paper on science funding featured in Science
Jan 30, 2014: Our PlaceAvoider paper featured in MIT Tech Review and elsewhere
Dec 9, 2013: Best paper award at ICCV Workshop on CV for Converging Perspectives
Oct 1, 2013: Air Force Office of Scientific Research contractto study cloud robotics, with G. Fox and K. Hauser
May 2, 2013: IU Collaborative Research Grant to use first-person cameras to study parent interactions with deaf children (with Houston, Smith, Pisoni, Bergeson-Dana, Yu)
Mar 25, 2013: Awarded NSF CAREER grant
Jan 1, 2013: Awarded IU Faculty Research Support Program (FRSP) grant for studying privacy in first-person cameras, with Apu Kapadia
Sept 12, 2012: Awarded NSF EAGER grant with Chris Raphael, to study optical music recognition
June 15, 2012: Communications of the ACM paper on social photo mining (with Noah Snavely)
May 5, 2012: Our WWW 2012 paper on using Flickr to study ecology featured in New Scientist
April 11, 2012: Awarded subcontract from ObjectVideo to participate in the IARPA Finder program
Sept 12, 2011: Awarded IU Faculty Research Support Program grant to use first-person cameras for studying autistic and typically-developing children, with Chen Yu
June 22, 2011: Our paper on 3d reconstruction won runner-up best paper at CVPR 2011!
Dec 21, 2010: Our PNAS paper on inferring social ties from geo-tags featured in New Scientist and BBC World Service
Aug 24, 2010: Awarded grant from the IU D2I Center for mining social media for ecology

Research
For an overview of my research, check out our vision lab projects page.

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'm a full Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, where I direct the IU Computer Vision Lab. I'm on the faculty of the Computer Science, Informatics, Cognitive Science, and Data Science programs, and I'm adjunct in the Department of Statistics. My work has been funded by grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation (including through a CAREER award), Facebook, Google, Kodak, the Department of Defense, and Indiana University.

Before joining IU, I was a graduate student and postdoc in Computer Science at Cornell University. I worked with Professor Dan Huttenlocher on statistical part-based object recognition algorithms, and 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, and specifically on detecting, tracking and recognizing text in video (both captions and text appearing naturally in a scene).


Recent Publications
Here are just a few recent publications; please see my lab's publications and projects pages, any my Google Scholar profile, for a complete list.

Teaching
Current:
  • (Not teaching in Fall 2023)

Past:
  • CSCI B551, Elements of Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021)
  • CSCI B657, Computer Vision (Fall 2010, Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023)
  • Info I609/I709, Seminar in Intelligent and Interactive Systems (Spring 2019)
  • CSCI B490/B659, Image processing and recognition (Spring 2015)
  • Info I210, Information Infrastructure I (Fall 2014)
  • Info I399, Research Methods for Undergraduates (Fall 2013)
  • CSCI B553, Probabilistic Approaches to Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2013)
  • Info I427, Search Informatics (Fall 2011, Spring 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015)
  • Info 2950, Mathematical Methods for Information Science, Fall 2008 (at Cornell)
  • CS 113, Introduction to C, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 (at Cornell)
  • CS 211, Algorithms and Data Structures in Java, Summer 2007 (at Cornell)
  • T.A. for CS 664, Computer Vision, Fall 2003 (at Cornell)
  • CSE 275, Digital Design Lab, Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 (at Penn State)

Graduated Ph.D. Students
For a complete list of current and former graduate and undergraduate students, please see our lab web page.

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
I love cycling. During graduate school I would take multi-day bike trips spanning hundreds of miles, but the tenure track has made those trips less feasible. These days I stay closer to home, enjoying weekend rides along the beautiful country roads of southern Indiana. I used to ski during winter until I moved to the second flattest state east of the Mississippi.

My current preferred winter activity is swimming in IU's fantastic pools. (My unofficial hobby is to swim in a public lap pool in as many cities of the world as possible (so far: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Blacksburg, Bloomington, Boulder, Chicago, Columbus, Copenhagen, Dallas, D.C., Denver, Detroit, Erie, Fort Collins, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Jamestown, Jerusalem, Kailua-Kona, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Minneapolis, Montreal, Munich, Nashville, New Orleans, Newcastle upon Tyne, Ottawa, Paris, Phoenix, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Jose, Santiago, Seoul, Shanghai, State College, Sydney, Tokyo, Vancouver, Venice).

I took piano for 12 years as a child and recently started picking it back up again. I've also been trying to learn organ. Since I can't produce great music myself, I'm happy to live just a few blocks from the amazing IU Jacobs School of Music.

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, Chile, and El Salvador. Despite all that effort, my Spanish is still remarkably lousy. :)

If you like pretty pictures, you might check out my dad's amazing bird photos. My own household flock includes Pichu and Sebastian; alumni are Betsy, Ron, Sally, Toto, Zuma, Rameses, Rameses II, and, of course, Cocoa.