Dr. Javier R. Movellan founded the Machine Perception Laboratory (MPLab) at UCSD, who's mission is to learn about intelligent behavior by developing systems that operate in the uncertain, time constrained, and sensory rich conditions of daily life. His research spans machine learning, machine perception (including vision and speech), automatic analysis of human behavior, and social robots. He also pioneered the development of social robots and their use for early childhood education. His work on human robot interaction was the first in the field to appear in a major scientific journal.
Prior to his UCSD position he was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD (1990), and a research associate at Carnegie Mellon University (1990-1993). Javier was president/CEO of Machine Perception Technologies from 2008 to 2012. Javier has authored more than 100 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings.
Dr. Marian Bartlett is a leader in the field of automatic facial expression analysis. She pioneered machine learning approaches to facial expression recognition from the nascence of the field in the mid-1990's with Paul Ekman and Terrence Sejnowski. She is co-developer of the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT), a widely known expression recognition system that was released to the academic community in 2011. Marian received her Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego in Cognitive Science and Psychology, and her B.A. from Middlebury College in Mathematics and Computer Science. She is Research Professor at the University of California, San Diego (on leave) where she directs the Computational Face Group of the Machine Perception Laboratory. Marian has authored over 70 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings, as well as a book, Face Image Analysis by Unsupervised Learning, published by Kluwer in 2001.
Ken Denman, President and CEO of Machine Perception Technologies, is an experienced executive with a range of proven leadership skills. His specific executive roles have spanned large corporate, entrepreneurial startups, emerging markets ventures, turnarounds and leading IPOs. Responsibilities and experiences have extended across mobile, broadband and software industries. Ken led iPass' successful Initial Public Offering, and led the strategy work for monetizing Openwave's patent portfolio and spinning off the operating units. He is an engaged angel investor and board member with both public and private board experience. At MediaOne International he drove the successful expansion of the company's mobile push by leading multi-national JV's that built the market leading mobile companies in many Central and Eastern European countries. Ken recently accepted an appointment to the Edward V. Fritzky Endowed Chair in Leadership at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, as a visiting professor.
Seth Neiman is a Senior Partner at Crosspoint Venture Partners, where he was responsible for Brocade, Foundry, Juniper, Avanex, Chromatis, iPass, ShoreTel, eSilicon among many. Prior to joining Crosspoint, Seth lead engineering at a number of companies, including the TOPs division of Sun, CoActive Computing, and Maxitron Systems. He is the lead investor in MPT, and was our acting CEO during the resetting of our strategy.
Dr. Paul Ekman, is a pioneer in the study of emotions and facial expressions, and is professor emeritus of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical School (UCSF) where he was active for 32 years. He currently continues to consult on research and training related to emotion and deception. Paul is best known for the study of universally recognized expressions of basic emotion, which emerged from a study of a remote tribe in Papua new Guinea in 1967. Contrary to the belief of many anthropologists at the time including Margaret Mead, Paul found that at least some facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but appear to be universal, and thus presumably biological in origin, as Charles Darwin had once theorized. Paul also discovered microexpressions that could be used to reliably detect concealed emotions. He also developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to objectively and comprehensively code human facial expression, in order to study the relationship between facial movement and internal state.
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in the fields of neural networks, machine learning, and computational neuroscience. He received his PhD in physics from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. He was on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University and he now holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and is also a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation and co-director of the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, which organizes an annual conference attended by over 1000 researchers in machine learning and neural computation and is the founding editor-in-chief of Neural Computation published by the MIT Press. An investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Ian R. Fasel is the head of software development at MPT. Prior to MPT, Ian was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, where he led the Arizona Robotics Research Group (ARRG)'s work on machine learning, computer vision, speech processing, multi-modal sensing, human-robot interaction, autonomous agents, game theory, neuroeconomics, linguistics, and cognitive development. His Ph.D. was from the University of California, San Diego (2006), and he holds a B.A. in Plan II Honors Liberal Arts and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (1999).