Kevin W. Bowyer
Schubmehl-Prein Professor and Department Chair
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Notre Dame



Since August of 2001, I have served as the Department Chair and Schubmehl-Prein Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. I was elected a Fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to algorithms for recognizing objects in images," and named a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society in 2001. I won Teaching Incentive Program Awards from the University of South Florida (USF) in 1997 and 1994, and an Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from USF in 1991. I was awarded my PhD in Computer Science from Duke University.

My research efforts are currently focused in two main areas: biometrics and data mining. My colleague Professor Patrick Flynn and I direct a research group that includes numerous PhD students and undergraduates, working on a variety of topics in biometrics. My work in iris biometrics with Notre Dame junior Sarah Ring was featured in a two-minute video that ran during halftime of the nationally-televised 2007 Notre Dame - Duke football game. Our lab's early intellectual property in iris biometrics is no longer available for license, but more recent IP in the area is still available. (For example, see our method of masking inconsistent bits in the iris code.) I served as General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems in 2007 (conference report) and 2008 (call for papers). My work in data mining is a long-term collaboration with Professor Larry Hall at the University of South Florida and Dr. Philip Kegelmeyer at Sandia National Laboratories. It is focused on creating ensembles of classifiers for problems that exhibit extreme characteristics such as a high imbalance between classes in the training data, unusually large size of training data, and noise in the class labels of the training data.

I have worked on a number of different topics in the general areas of computer vision and pattern recognition, including computer-aided detection of signs of cancer in mammography, range image segmentation and model-building, aspect graph representation of 3D objects, and recognition of generic objects through reasoning about functionality. A list of selected publications is available, along with pdf versions of many of them. And here is a list of my PhD graduates. My research efforts have been supported by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, Central Intelligence Agency, ITIC, Sandia National Labs, Department of Justice, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and NASA.

I have led several NSF-sponsored workshops on the theme of "Teaching Ethics and Computing." My book Ethics and Computing: Living Responsibly in a Computerized World is an IEEE Press / Wiley Press title (information about the book). My article titled Face Recognition Technology and the Security Versus Privacy Tradeoff received an Award of Excellence from the Society for Technical Communication. Also, Professor Dianne Martin of The George Washington University and I organize the annual Schubmehl-Prein Competition for the best essay on the social impact of computing technology.

I currently serve or have served as a member of the editorial boards of a number of journals:

some fishing pictures.