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.

My research efforts are currently focused in two main areas: biometrics and data mining.

Professor Patrick Flynn and I direct the Computer Vision Research Lab at Notre Dame. In recent years, our research group typically includes ten or more PhD students and numerous undergraduates. We have done extensive work in multiple areas of biometrics, including iris biometrics, 2D and 3D face recognition, 2D and 3D ear biometrics, and various multi-modal biometric approaches.

Our research group has been involved with the Human ID Gait Challenge, the Face Recognition Grand Challenge, the Face Recognition Vendor Test 2006, the Iris Challenge Evaluation, and the Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge,

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.

Each year, a number of undergraduates are working on research projects in our lab. As one example, Sarah Ring worked on the effects of contact lenses on iris biometrics. Her work was featured in a two-minute video during halftime of the nationally-televised 2007 Notre Dame - Duke football game. She presented a paper on her work at the 2008 BTAS conference. Other recent undergrads whose research led to publications include Amanda Hentz, who also worked on the effect of contact lenses on iris biometrics, and Vince Thomas, who worked on determining a person's gender of a person from their iris texture.

Our lab's early intellectual property in iris biometrics is no longer available for license, but more recent IP in the iris biometrics area is still available. (For example, see our method of masking inconsistent bits in the iris code.)

I gave the opening keynote talk at the 8th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in September 2008. This talk included an overview of our contributions in the area of 3D face recognition (pdf of slides). I gave an invited talk at the Biometric Technology for Human Identification VI in April 2009. This talk gave an overview of our lab's recent results in iris biometrics. A copy of the corresponding paper is available here. I also gave the opening keynote talk at the Second Multidisciplinary Workshop on Identity in the Information Society (IDIS 09) held at the London School of Economics in June 2009.

I was the founding General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, serving as General Chair in 2007 (conference report) 2008 (conference report) and 2009 (conference report). I am also serving as General Chair of the 2011 International Joint Conference on Biometrics.

I was elected a Fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to algorithms for recognizing objects in images," and was named a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society in 2001.

Over the years, I have worked on a number of different topics in 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.

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 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.