Curriculum Vitae

CHRISTOPHER P. STAUFFER, Ph.D.

Contact Information
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
32 Vassar Street, The Stata Center
MIT 32-D526
Cambridge, MA 02139

Tel: (617) 253-5868

Fax: (617) 258-5060
Email: stauffer@csail.mit.edu
Webpage: http://www.csail.mit.edu/~stauffer/

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
Sept 95-Mar 01 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June
1998. Doctorate of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2001. Cumulative GPA
5.0/5.0. Member of Institute of Electrical Engineering and Electronics Engineers and Sigma Xi Scientific
Research Society and Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society.
Sept 90-Sept 95 Northwestern University. Triple major: Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science,
and Biomedical Engineering, June, 1995. Cumulative GPA 3.57/4.0. Met Premed qualifications. Member of
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society. Tutored in computer science,
mathematics, and electrical engineering. Four-man team placed first in 1993 and place third in 1995 Northwestern
University design competition.
Aug 93-Feb 94

Saint Olaf College. Participated in St. Olaf's Global Semester Program. For 5 months, studied culture, history,
economics, art, religion, and medical practices in Switzerland, Greece, Israel, Egypt, India, Nepal, Hong Kong,
China, and Japan.

June 93-Dec 93 Evanston Hospital, Illinois. Studied for Emergency Medical Techniciaion- Ambulance Class certificiation and
emergency room rotation.
WORK EXPERIENCE
June 01-present Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Cambridge, MA
Postdoctoral Research Associate. Lead researcher for the Activity Perception Project and Visual Surveillance and
Monitoring Project. Introduced surveillance architecture to new environments including Hanscom Airforce Base,
Lincoln Laboratories, Bedford Regional Airport, and in residential settings. http://www.csail.mit.edu/
Mar 99-Aug 02 ALPHATECH, Inc.
Burlington, MA
Primary consultant on STTR technology transfer grant focused on adapting some work I developed at MIT to
ALPHATECH. The installation at the Rhode Island T. F. Green Airport performs real-time, semi-automated
surveillance and is still active today. http://www.alphatech.com/
Sep 95-Mar 01

Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Cambridge, MA
Lead technical researcher on numerous government grants totaling multiple millions of dollars in the area of video
surveillance and activity modeling and perception. Pursued research in automated visual surveillance, audio
perception, long-term temporal pattern analysis, anomaly detection, and various other topics. Developed
automated surveillance architecture for wide-area, multi-camera surveillance, object classification, activity
analysis, and associated visualization tools. http://www.ai.mit.edu/

Mar 95-Sept 95 ProVation Medical, Inc. (was CMORE Medical Solutions, Incorporated)
Minneapolis, MN
Third team member of CMORE Medical, Inc., a technology-based startup venture in endoscopy and colonoscopy
medical informatics. Assisted in business development and designed a reusable software architecture that is still a
key component of the software today. Prohttp://www.provation.com/
Mar 95-Sept 95 Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL
Developed visualization and benchmark studies for the massively parallel processing architecture in three
dimensional immersive environment, The CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment. http://www.anl.gov/
June 94-Sept. 94 The Institute for the Learning Sciences(Northwestern University)

Evanston, IL

Development of software in robotics and vision lab, including low-level vision. Implemented basic hand-eye
coordination using 2D visual analysis techniques coupled with automatic calibration techniques. Implemented
parts-based object recognition of vehicles.
July 90-Sept. 93 Northwest Anesthesia P.A.
Minneapolis, MN
Developed a semi-automated scheduling program for a group of 25 doctors. Enabled numerous doctors and
schedule constraints to be optimized while respecting individual doctors scheduling constraints. 15,000 lines of
code in Pascal. Still in use.
SELECTED REFEREED PUBLICATIONS
Chris Stauffer, "Learning to Track Object Through Unobserved Regions", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Motion, January
5-7, Breckenridge, CO, 2005.
Chris Stauffer, "Factored Latent Analysis for far-field tracking data", Proceedings of Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Banff,
Canada, July 7-11, 2004.
Chris Stauffer, "Learning a Probabilistic Similarity Function for Segmentation", IEEE Workshop on Perceptual Organization in
Computer Vision (POCV04) in conjunction with CVPR2004, Washington D.C., June 28, 2004.
Chris Stauffer, "Learning a factorized segmental representation of far-field tracking data", Event Mining 2004: Detection and
Recognition of Events in Video(EVENT2004) in conjunction with CVPR2004, Washington D.C., July 2, 2004.
Chris Stauffer, Kinh Tieu, and Lily Lee, "Robust automated planar normalization of tracking data", Joint IEEE International
Workshop on Visual Surveillance and Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (VSPETS2003), Nice, France,
October 11-12, 2003.
Chris Stauffer, "Minimally-Supervised Classification using Multiple Observation Sets", Proceedings of the ninth IEEE
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV2003), October 13-15, 2003.
Chris Stauffer and Kinh Tieu, "Automated multi-camera planar tracking correspondence modeling", Proceedings of the IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR2003), Volume I, Pages 259-266, July 2003.
Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Chris Stauffer, and Eric Grimson, "Answering Questions about Moving Objects in Surveillance Videos",
Proceedings of 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium on New Directions in Question Answering, Palo Alto, CA, March 2003.
Chris Stauffer, "Estimating Tracking Sources and Sinks", Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Event Mining
(EVENT2003), July 17, 2003.
Chris Stauffer, "Perceptual Data Mining", Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, May 2002.
Chris Stauffer, Erik G. Miller, and Kinh Tieu, "Transform-invariant image decomposition with similarity templates", Advances
in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, eds. T. G. Dietterich, S. Becker, and Z. Ghahramani, MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2002.
Chris Stauffer and Eric Grimson, "Similarity templates for detection and recognition", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR2001), , 2001.
Chris Stauffer and Eric Grimson, "Learning Patterns of Activity Using Real-Time Tracking", IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Recognition and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), Vol. 22(8), pp. 747-757, 2000.
Yuri Ivanov, Chris Stauffer, Aaron Bobick, and W.E.L. Grimson, "Video Surveillance of Interactions", IEEE Workshop on Visual
Surveillance (VS1999) in conjunction with ICCV2001, pp. Fort Collins, CO, June 26, 1999.
Chris Stauffer, "Automatic hierarchical classification using time-based co-occurrences", Proceedings IEEE Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR1999), pp. 333-339, Fort Collins, CO, June 23-25, 1999.
Chris Stauffer, "Adaptive background mixture models for real-time tracking", Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, pp. 246-252, Fort Collins, CO, June 23-25, 1999.
W.E.L. Grimson, Chris Stauffer, Lily Lee, and Raquel Romano, "Using Adaptive Tracking to Classify and Monitor Activities in a
Site", Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(CVPR1998), pp. 22-31, Santa Barbara,
CA, June 23-28, 1998.
Chris Stauffer, "Scene Reconstruction Using Accumulated Line-of-Sight", Masters Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, MA, May 1997.
BOOK CHAPTERS AND TELEVISION
Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Chris Stauffer, and Eric Grimson, Chapter 9: Answering Questions about Moving Objects in Video in
New Directions in Question Answering, ed. Mark T. Maybury, MIT Press, October 2004.
Video Surveillance work was highlighted in the nationally-broadcast PBS documentary 2001: Hals Legacy, created by David G.
Stork, Produced by the Independent Communication Associates (InCA).

SOCIETIES,
HONORS &
ACTIVITIES

Deans' List. Eta Kappa Nu, Electrical Engineering Honor Society. McCormick School of Engineering
Student Advisory Board. 1993 Northwestern University Design Competition Champion. 1995 Northwestern
University Design Competition Team Captain of runner-up team.

RECENT PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Served on program committee and as session chair for IEEE Workshop on Visual Motion 2005, serving on program
committee for the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR2005), serving on program
committee for OMNIVIS, serving on program committee for the 9 th European Conference on Computer Vision
(ECCV2006), serving on the program committee for the 7 th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV2006), served on
program committee of the International Conference on Computer Vision theory and Applications, active reviewer for the
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, the Image and Vision Computing Journal, the
Machine Vision and Applications Journal, Pattern Recognition Letters, the IEE Proceedings on Vision, Image and Signal
Processing, the International Journal of Computer Vision, and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Participant in the
Collaborative Tracking Research effort running web site and developing a community process for evaluating tracking
performance and requirements.
PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS
My work over the past decade has centered on the development of a systems that are capable of: automatically tracking
multiple objects in real-time across multiple overlapping and non-overlapping cameras in unstructured indoor and outdoor
environments; automatically modeling the types of objects in a particular environment; automatically modeling the
activities that these objects perform; learning patterns of the activities over extended periods of time; and detecting unusual
objects or behavior. I am currently extending these techniques, investigating alternative machine learning paradigms, lifelong learning, and segmentation and clustering of non-stationary and multi-modal observation processes.
REFERENCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Prof. W. Eric L. Grimson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
holds the Bernard Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering at MIT. He also holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer on
Radiology at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Prof. Grimson recently served as the
Education Officer for the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and currently holds the position of
Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Prof. Grimson currently heads
the Computer Vision Group of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prof. Grimson is a Fellow of
the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the IEEE, and was awarded the Bose Award for
Excellence in Teaching in the School of Engineering at MIT. Contact email: welg@csail.mit.edu. Contact phone:
(617)253-5346.
Prof. Rodney Brooks is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He also is the director of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Laboratory at MIT. He is also the Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. Dr. Brooks is a Founding Fellow
of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence). Brooks has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer
at Dartmouth College, the Hyland lecturer at Hughes, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding
editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including
Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing.
Contact email: brooks@csail.mit.edu. Contact phone: (617)253-5223.
Prof. Tomas Lozano-Perez is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is
the TIBCO Founders Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. He is a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young
Investigator Award and is a founding Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Contact email:
tlp@mit.edu. Contact phone: (617)253-7889.
Prof. Larry Davis is a professor in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Maryland. He was the head of the Computer Vision Laboratory of the Center for automation research from
1981 through 1986. He is currently Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland. He was
named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1997. Dr. Davis is known for his research in computer vision and high performance
computing. Contact email: lsd@umiacs.umd.edu. Contact phone: (301)405-6718.
Prof. Aaron Bobick is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the position of Chair of the Interface Computing
Division and is the director of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center. He is a foremost researcher in the area of
computer vision and human computer interface design. Contact email: afb@cc.gatech.edu. Contact phone: (404)894-8591.