Faculty Members

Pierre Boulanger

Dr. Pierre Boulanger cumulates more than 36 years of experience in 3D computer vision, rapid product development, and the applications of virtual reality systems to medicine and industrial manufacturing. Dr. Boulanger worked for 18 years at the National Research Council of Canada as a senior research officer, where his primary research interest was in 3D computer vision, rapid product development, and virtualized reality systems. He now has a double appointment as a professor at the University of Alberta Department of Computing Science and the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging. He is currently the Director of the Advanced Human-Computer Interface Laboratory (AHCI) as well as the scientific Director of the SERVIER Virtual Cardiac Centre. In 2013, Dr. Boulanger was awarded the CISCO chair in healthcare solutions, ten years of investment by CISCO systems in the development of new IT technologies for healthcare in Canada. His main research topics are the development of new techniques for telemedicine, patient-specific modelling using sensor fusion, and the application of telepresence technologies to medical training, simulation, and collaborative diagnostics. His work has contributed to gaining international recognition in this field, publishing more than 450 scientific papers and collaborating with more than 15 universities, research labs, and industrial companies across the world. He is on the editorial board of two major academic journals. Dr. Boulanger is also on many international committees and frequently gives lectures on computational medicine and augmented reality systems. He is also the CTO of Naiad Lab Inc., a start-up dedicated to using advanced technology solutions to enhance our clientele’s health and quality of life worldwide. For Dr. Boulanger’s full CV (Full CV) and for a partial publication, the list sees the ResearchGate website.

Kumaradevan Punithakumar

Dr. Kumaradevan Punithakumar received his B.Sc.Eng. (with First class Hons.) degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, and his M.A.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McMaster University.  From 2001 to 2002 he was an Instructor in the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa. From 2002 to 2007, he was a Teaching Assistant and, in 2008, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University. From 2008 to 2012, he was an Imaging Research Scientist at GE Healthcare, Canada. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging, and an Operational and Computational Director at the Servier Virtual Cardiac Centre, Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. Dr. Punithakumar was the recipient of the Industrial Research and Development Fellowship by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada in 2008, and the GE Innovation award in 2009. Areas of interest include medical image analysis and visualization, information fusion, object tracking and nonlinear filtering.

Nilanjan Ray

Dr. Nilanjan Ray received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, in 1995, a master′s degree in computer science from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, in 1997, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in May 2003. After having two years of postdoctoral research and a year of industrial work experience, he joined the Department of Computing Science, at the University of Alberta in July 2006. Now, he is a full professor in this Department. I received the CIMPA-UNESCO fellowship for image processing in 1999; the graduate fellowship at Indian Statistical Institute from 1995 to 1997; and the best student paper award from IBM Picture Processing Society presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Rochester, NY, 2002. His research areas are in image and video analysis – analytics, segmentation, object detection, image classification, and object tracking.

Walter F. Bischof (Emeritus)

Dr. Walter Bischof has a strong interest in interdisciplinary research, and his research projects are both in Computer Science and Psychology. In Computer Science, his interests are primarily focused on investigating human-computer interactions. In this area, he is interested in developing new ways in which the collaboration of humans and computers can be improved, ensuring that the focus is on the human, rather than the machine. In Psychology, he has a strong interest in visual perception and attentional mechanisms. In visual perception, he has studied motion perception in the context of spatial navigation. With respect to attentional mechanisms, he has studied spatiotemporal characteristics of attention and has worked on investigating attentional characteristics in social attention and in navigation.