Brown CS News

Brown CS Alums And Adjunct Faculty Win The Longuet-Higgins Prize And The PAMI Young Researcher Award

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Click the links that follow for more news items about previous Brown CS winners of the Longuet-Higgins prize and other recent accomplishments by our alums and faculty.

Brown CS alums Deqing Sun ‘13 (currently a research scientist at Google) and Stefan Roth ‘07 (currently a professor of computer science at TU Darmstadt), along with Brown CS adjunct faculty member Michael Black (currently at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems), have won the Longuet-Higgins Prize for their paper on optical flow estimation. Deqinq has also won the PAMI Young Researcher award (shared with Jon Barron of Google Research) for his contributions to computer vision. 

The PAMI Young Researcher award is given out by the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee, and aims to recognize young researchers who have made groundbreaking advances in computer vision within seven years of completing their PhD. The Longuet-Higgins award is presented by the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee at each year’s CVPR, a premier annual computer vision event, for fundamental contributions in computer vision. The award recognizes CVPR papers from ten years ago with significant impact on computer vision research. 

Deqing, Stefan, and Michael’s award-winning paper was written in 2010, when both Deqing and Michael were at Brown University, and focuses primarily on the reasons behind recent advancements in the accuracy of optical flow estimation algorithms. The trio attempted to uncover the drivers behind these advancements via a thorough analysis of how the objective function, the optimization method, and modern implementation practices influence accuracy. 

In a recent retrospective blog post, Michael explains the journey behind his research and reminisces about some of his key takeaways from the process. “I’m still happy with this one and I feel so very fortunate to have had great students like Deqing and Stefan as collaborators and friends,” he explains. “That is the final, true, 'secret' of this paper: work with great people who you like, and enjoy the process.”

Professor Pedro Felzenszwalb of Brown CS and Brown's School of Engineering was also a winner of the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2018

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Outreach Specialist Jesse Polhemus.