Dr. Kanade was the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the director of Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. He was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. He also founded the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo and served as founding director. He received the prestigious 2016 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, presented by the Inamori Foundation to individuals such as Kanade who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humankind. Kanade’s prize recognizes his pioneering contributions to computer vision and robotics. Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multimedia, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics and sensors.
He has written more than 400 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 20 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Kanade’s other professional honors include:
election to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence; several awards including Kyoto Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Institute Medal and Bower Prize, C&C Award, Okawa Award, ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, Joseph Engelberger Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, IEEE Foundation Medal and ICCV Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award. He was a keynote of IEEE FG in 2015, and published 14 papers in past editions of FG.