Biography

David B. Cooper received the BSc and ScM degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the industrial co-op program in 1957 and the PhD degree in applied mathematics from Columbia University, New York, in 1966. From 1957 to 1966, he worked for Sylvania Electric Products, Inc., Mountain View, California and then for the Raytheon Co., Waltham, Massachusetts, on communications and radar systems analysis. Since 1966, he has been a professor of engineering at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He was cofounder and associate director of the Brown University Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems (LEMS) from 1982 through 1997 and served on the executive committee of the Division of Engineering, Brown University for a few years. He was named a fellow of the IEEE for his research contributions, among the earliest papers, on unsupervised learning, combined supervised and unsupervised learning, and the Bayesian approach to image boundary estimation, segmentation, 3D stereo reconstruction, and optimally combining unreliable pieces of information in 3D. His more recent research interests have been on 2D and 3D object estimation and recognition from many unreliable fragments of information obtained from video or LIDAR, geometric learning, ad hoc sensor networks—specifically the theory for how to use 1,000 Cameras, and various data analysis problems for extraction of information from fragments found at archaeological sites.