Gregory D. Hager (born May 9, 1961) is the Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University.

Gregory D. Hager
Born (1961-05-09) May 9, 1961 (age 62)
Alma materUniversity of Pennsylvania, Luther College
Known forVision-based robotics, computer vision, human-machine collaborative systems, computer-integrated medicine
TitleMandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science
AwardsAAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, MICCAI Fellow, AIMBE Fellow, Hans Fischer Fellow, TUM Ambassador, Kuka Innovation Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Vision, Robotics, Medical Imaging, Computer-Integrated Medicine
InstitutionsJohns Hopkins University, Yale University, Technical University of Munich
Websitecs.jhu.edu/hager

His principal areas of research are collaborative and vision-based robotics, time-series analysis of image data, and medical applications of image analysis and robotics. Hager develops real-time computer vision algorithms for robotic systems. His work offers novel applications for automated surgical training, medical imaging and diagnostics, and computer-enhanced interventional medicine.

Early life and education edit

Hager was born in Waukon, Iowa. He graduated summa cum laude from Luther College in 1983. Hager went on to earn a master's degree (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) from University of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of advisors Dr. Dale Miller and Dr. Max Mintz, respectively. He received the Rubinoff Dissertation Prize for his PhD Thesis entitled "Active Reduction of Uncertainty in Multi-Sensor Systems."[1]

Career and research edit

Immediately following his PhD, Hager was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe (1988–90), and was on the faculty at Yale University prior to joining Johns Hopkins in 1999.

At Johns Hopkins, Hager is the Mandell Bellmore Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He also holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. From 2010 - 2015, he served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science. In 2016, Hager became the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, a multidisciplinary research center aimed at driving engineering innovations in healthcare.[2]

His laboratory, the Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab (CIRL), studies problems that involve dynamic, spatial interaction at the intersection of imaging, robotics, and human-computer interaction.

Hager has made many highly cited contributions to computer vision and robotics. His early work focused on visual tracking and vision-based control for manipulation. Together with Seth Hutchinson and Peter Corke, he authored a tutorial on vision-based motion control for robotics [3] which continues to be one of the most highly cited articles published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

In addition to vision-based control,[4][5][6] Hager has also published influential articles on visual tracking,[7][8][9][10] pose estimation from images,[11] and collaborative control.[12]

In the area of medicine, Hager is known for pioneering work on the "language of surgery" which seeks to model surgical procedures and evaluate surgical skill from recorded operative data.[13][14][15][16][17][18]

He has numerous publications in other areas, including ultrasound elastography,[19][20][21] activity recognition from video images,[22][23] vision-based navigation,[24][25][26][27][28] 3D reconstruction from images,[29][30][31] and robot motion planning,[32][33][34][35]

Hager's many contributions to the field of vision-based robotics has earned him status as an IEEE Fellow. Additionally, he has been named a Fellow of the MICCAI Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

In 2014, he was awarded a Hans Fischer Fellowship at the Technical University of Munich's Institute of Advanced Study.[36]

In 2024, he joined the National Science Foundation as Assistant Director of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. [37]

Service edit

Hager has served on numerous prominent review committees and panels. Together with Susan Graham, he co-chaired the 2015 Review of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD) and provided congressional testimony on the report.[38] He was a member of the inaugural "100 Year Study on Artificial Intelligence";[39] a roundtable on AI and foreign policy held by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine; and a panel at the 2018 AAAS annual meeting on "Artificial Intelligence: Augmenting Not Replacing People".[40] He is a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) advisory committee, a member of the governing board of the International Federation of Robotics Research, and a past board member of the Computing Research Association. Hager is the past chair of the Computing Community Consortium, where he led multiple initiatives for the computing research community, including the BRAIN initiative, AI for Social Good, and Industry-Academic Relations.

Hager has served on the organizing committee for several major conferences including ICCV 2015 (General Chair), CVPR 2013 (Program Chair), ISRR 2017 (General Chair). He has served as associate editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision, the International Journal of Robotics Research, the Transactions on Robotics, and the ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.

Private sector edit

Hager is a co-founder of two startups: Clear Guide Medical, whose platform enables doctors and technicians to perform more accurate ultrasound-guided procedures, and Ready Robotics, dedicated to making industrial robots easier to use. He has served as technical advisor to two others - Theater.io which develops systems for video-based analysis of surgery, and Ikona medical which developed software for enhanced capsule endoscopy review. Hager is currently on leave from Johns Hopkins and serves as Director of Applied Science for Amazon Just Walk Out Technologies and the Amazon Dash Cart.

Awards and honors edit

  • 2019: Fellow of the AAAS
  • 2018: Fellow of the ACM
  • 2017: TUM Ambassador
  • 2017: Fellow of AIMBE
  • 2016: KUKA Innovation Award
  • 2015: Fellow of the MICCAI Society
  • 2014: Hans Fischer Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Technical University of Munich
  • 2013: Distinguished Alumni Award, Luther College
  • 2006: Fellow of the IEEE

References edit

  1. ^ Greg Hager (1991) "Active Reduction of Uncertainty in Multi-Sensor Systems." PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania
  2. ^ Johns Hopkins University."New interdisciplinary center at Johns Hopkins aims to reshape medical care"
  3. ^ Greg Hager, Seth Hutchinson and Peter Corke (1996). "A tutorial on visual servo control." IEEE transactions on robotics and automation 12 (5), 651-670
  4. ^ GD Hager (1997). "A modular system for robust positioning using feedback from stereo vision." IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 13 (4), 582-595
  5. ^ GD Hager, WC Chang, AS Morse (1995). "Robot hand-eye coordination based on stereo vision." IEEE Control Systems Magazine 15 (1), 30-39
  6. ^ N Padoy, GD Hager (2011). "Human-machine collaborative surgery using learned models." 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation,
  7. ^ Gregory D Hager, Peter N Belhumeur (1998). "Efficient region tracking with parametric models of geometry and illumination." IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence
  8. ^ Christopher Rasmussen, Gregory D Hager (2001). "Probabilistic data association methods for tracking complex visual objects." IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence
  9. ^ Christopher Rasmussen, Gregory D Hager (1998). "Joint probabilistic techniques for tracking multi-part objects" Proceedings. 1998 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No. 98CB36231).
  10. ^ GD Hager, M Dewan, CV Stewart (2004). "Multiple kernel tracking with SSD." Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2004. CVPR 2004.
  11. ^ CP Lu, GD Hager, E Mjolsness (2000). "Fast and globally convergent pose estimation from video images." IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  12. ^ A Bettini, P Marayong, S Lang, AM Okamura, GD Hager (2004). "Vision-assisted control for manipulation using virtual fixtures." IEEE Transactions on Robotics
  13. ^ HC Lin, I Shafran, D Yuh, GD Hager (2006). "Towards automatic skill evaluation: Detection and segmentation of robot-assisted surgical motions." Computer Aided Surgery
  14. ^ CE Reiley, GD Hager (2009). "Task versus subtask surgical skill evaluation of robotic minimally invasive surgery." International conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention.
  15. ^ L Zappella, B Béjar, G Hager, R Vidal (2013). "Surgical gesture classification from video and kinematic data." Medical Image Analysis.
  16. ^ N Ahmidi, P Poddar, JD Jones, SS Vedula, L Ishii, GD Hager, M Ishii (2015). "Automated objective surgical skill assessment in the operating room from unstructured tool motion in septoplasty." International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery
  17. ^ Narges Ahmidi, Lingling Tao, Shahin Sefati, Yixin Gao, Colin Lea, Benjamin Bejar Haro, Luca Zappella, Sanjeev Khudanpur, René Vidal, Gregory D Hager (2017). "A dataset and benchmarks for segmentation and recognition of gestures in robotic surgery." IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
  18. ^ TS Kim, M O’Brien, S Zafar, GD Hager, S Sikder, SS Vedula (2019). "Objective assessment of intraoperative technical skill in capsulorhexis using videos of cataract surgery." International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery
  19. ^ H Rivaz, EM Boctor, MA Choti, GD Hager (2010). "Real-time regularized ultrasound elastography." IEEE transactions on Medical Imaging
  20. ^ H Rivaz, E Boctor, P Foroughi, R Zellars, G Fichtinger, G Hager (2008). "Ultrasound elastography: a dynamic programming approach." IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
  21. ^ A Krupa, G Fichtinger, GD Hager. "Real-time motion stabilization with B-mode ultrasound using image speckle information and visual servoing." The International Journal of Robotics Research
  22. ^ C Lea, A Reiter, R Vidal, GD Hager (2016). "Segmental spatiotemporal cnns for fine-grained action segmentation." European Conference on Computer Vision
  23. ^ C Lea, MD Flynn, R Vidal, A Reiter, GD Hager (2017). "Temporal convolutional networks for action segmentation and detection." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 156-165
  24. ^ S Atiya, GD Hager (1993). "Real-time vision-based robot localization." IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation
  25. ^ D Burschka, M Li, M Ishii, RH Taylor, GD Hager (2005). "Scale-invariant registration of monocular endoscopic images to CT-scans for sinus surgery." Medical Image Analysis
  26. ^ DJ Mirota, M Ishii, GD Hager (2011). "Vision-based navigation in image-guided interventions." Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering
  27. ^ H Wang, D Mirota, M Ishii, GD Hager (2008). "Robust motion estimation and structure recovery from endoscopic image sequences with an adaptive scale kernel consensus estimator." 2008 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  28. ^ S Leonard, A Sinha, A Reiter, M Ishii, GL Gallia, RH Taylor, GD Hager (2018). Evaluation and Stability Analysis of Video-Based Navigation System for Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery on In Vivo Clinical Data." IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
  29. ^ MZ Brown, D Burschka, GD Hager (2003). "Advances in computational stereo." IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence
  30. ^ X Liu, A Sinha, M Unberath, M Ishii, GD Hager, RH Taylor, A Reiter. "Self-supervised learning for dense depth estimation in monocular endoscopy." OR 2.0 Context-Aware Operating Theaters, Computer Assisted Robotic Endoscopy, Clinical Image-Based Procedures, and Skin Image Analysis
  31. ^ EM Meisner, GD Hager, SL Ishman, D Brown, DE Tunkel, M Ishii (2013). "Anatomical reconstructions of pediatric airways from endoscopic images: A pilot study of the accuracy of quantitative endoscopy." The Laryngoscope
  32. ^ E Plaku, GD Hager. "Sampling-based motion and symbolic action planning with geometric and differential constraints." 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
  33. ^ CE Reiley, E Plaku, GD Hager. "Motion generation of robotic surgical tasks: Learning from expert demonstrations." 2010 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
  34. ^ C Paxton, V Raman, GD Hager, M Kobilarov (2017). "Combining neural networks and tree search for task and motion planning in challenging environments." 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
  35. ^ C Paxton, GD Hager, L Bascetta (2015). "An incremental approach to learning generalizable robot tasks from human demonstration." 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  36. ^ Greg Hager, Technical University of Munich profile
  37. ^ Greg Hager Appointed as NSF's New Computer and Information Science Chief
  38. ^ Review of the NITRD, Testimony of Dr. Gregory D. Hager. Retrieved 2019-06-09
  39. ^ Greg Hager. "One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence." Oct 2016.
  40. ^ 2018 AAAS Annual Meeting, "Artificial Intelligence: Augmenting Not Replacing People."

External links edit