David Crandall
David Crandall, a professor of computer science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, has been recommended to the Indiana University Board of Trustees for a Luddy Professorship.
The Luddy Professorship is made possible as part of the transformative $60 million gift from IU alumnus and information technology pioneer Fred Luddy in 2019. Luddy Professors are honored for their outstanding work leading world-class, high-impact research. Crandall’s work focuses on computer vision, the area of computer science that tries to design algorithms that can “see.” He is particularly interested in visual object detection, action recognition, and scene reconstruction. In addition to studying fundamental algorithms, his work applies these new techniques in interdisciplinary collaborations.
“David’s work is critical because computer vision opens so many pathways for computing to make advances,” said Dennis Groth, interim dean of the Luddy School. “Automatically analyzing, understanding, and organizing visual information has long been a challenge, but it is becoming ever more important due to the drastic expansion of visual data that is created every day. David’s research has put the Luddy School at the forefront of computer vision.”
Crandall joined the Luddy School in 2010 and is the director of the IU Computer Vision Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2008 and the M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science and engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Before joining IU, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell and as a research scientist at Eastman Kodak Company. Crandall’s research at IU has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA, Google, and Facebook, among others.
“I feel so honored to receive a Luddy Professorship, but the reason my work has been successful is because of the environment that IU has provided and the wonderful colleagues – students, faculty, and staff – with whom I’ve had the opportunity to work,” Crandall said. “I’m thankful to Fred Luddy for his investment in our school, which will help sustain this environment and nurture our students, faculty, and staff in countless ways.”
Established in 2000, the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering is one of the broadest schools of its kind. Blending the fields of computer science, informatics, intelligent systems engineering, information and library science, and data science, the Luddy School is home to more than 3,000 students from the United States and around the globe. The forward-looking School’s faculty are world-renowned experts in their respective fields, and computer and information sciences research expenditures are ranked 12th in the country.