About me
Computer vision and object recognition
Research lab: Watson Research Center (Hawthorne)
I am a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York (north of NYC, near White Plains). I graduated from MIT in 1989 with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and have been here ever since. I have written books on robots, robot learning, and biometrics. I was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) from 1995-1999, and co-taught a undergraduate seminar course on man-machine interaction (Spring Semester 2001) as part of the Cognitive Science Program in the Department of Psychology at Vassar College.
At IBM I have done work on mobile robot navigation, machine learning, wearable computers, and vegetable recognition. Most recently I have been involved with computer vision for video search, biometric identification, and advanced user interfaces. I am generally interested in robotics, vision, and complete AI systems. See the web site for IBM's Exploratory Computer Vision Group for more details.
Some interesting links:
- Johuco - A company which makes small mobile robots.
- Vision Research - Some of the projects I have done in the vision group.
- AlphaWorks - Sometimes IBM has interesting free software packages here.
- Patents - A useful tool for searching prior art.
- Virus Hoaxes - This reference tells which virus alerts are real.
- Harrick Scientific - The spectrometer accessories company where my wife works.
- Cheval Spirits - A horse role-playing game maintained by my daughter.
- Jocko & Lully - Kids' stories about two goats and their vacations by my mom.
- Thespism - A "meta-theology" borrowing from Pierre Teilhard.
- Quantum Nucleonics - Very high density energy storage using Hafnium-178.
- Mini-Magnetosphere - Possible interplanetary drives from NASA.
- Antigravity and FTL - NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program.
- Wild Pigs - Surprisingly riveting live video from a German zoo.
Some of my older robotics and AI papers, as well as videos:
Visual Rotation Detection and Estimation for Mobile Robot Navigation
M. Albert and J. Connell
Proc. of the 2004 IEEE International Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-04),
pp. 4247-4252, April 2004.
PDF Version
Extensible Shallow Parsing for Semantic Nets
J. Connell
IBM Computer Science Research Report RC 22339, January 2001.
PDF Version
Beer on the Brain
J. Connell
Proc. of the 2000 AAAI Spring Symposium, My Dinner with R2D2: Natural Dialogues with Practical Robotics Devices, pp. 25-26, March 2000.
PDF Version
Get Me That Screwdriver!
Developing a Sensory-Action Vocabulary for Fetch-and-Carry Tasks
J. Connell
IBM Computer Science Research Report RC 19473, March 1994.
PDF Version
Extending the Navigation Metaphor
J. Connell
Proc. of the 1992 AAAI Fall Symposium, pp. 29-35, November 1992.
PDF Version
SSS: A Hybrid Architecture Applied to Robot Navigation
J. Connell
Proc. of the 1992 IEEE International Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-92),
pp. 2719-2724, 1992.
PDF Version Video (25.4 MB MPEG-1)
Automatic Programming of Behavior-based Robots using Reinforcement Learning
S. Mahadevan and J. Connell
Artificial Intelligence, vol. 55, Nos. 2-3, pp. 311-365, June 1992.
PDF Version Video (36.0 MB MPEG-1)
Neural Control of a Mobile Robot
J. Connell
Expanded version of an article that appeared in Popular Electronics, August 1991.
PDF Version
Designing Behavior-based Robots
J. Connell
Expanded version of a paper that appeared in the SPIE-91 Conference on Mobile Robots VI, Vol. 1613, pp. 34-45, 1991.
PDF Version
Cooperative Control of a Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robot
J. Connell and P. Viola
Proc. of the 1990 IEEE International Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-90),
pp. 1118-1121, 1990.
PDF Version
A Colony Architecture for an Artificial Creature
J. Connell
Ph.D thesis, MIT AI Lab 1989, available as MIT AITR-1151 (PDF 9.5MB)
also in book form as Minimalist Mobile Robotics , Academic Press, 1990.
Videos (MPEG-1): Navigating (9.4 MB) , Reaching (13.5 MB) , Full Demo (46 MB)
Last updated 7 Jun 2006