CICS Professor Erik Learned-Miller Receives Mark Everingham Award for Contributions to Computer Vision Research

College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Professor Erik Learned-Miller, along with CICS alumnus Gary Huang, and Facebook research scientist Tamara Berg, have received the Mark Everingham Award from the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), sponsored by the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE).

The award is given annually by the Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence of the IEEE Computer Society to researchers who have made a selfless contribution of significant benefit to other members of the computer-vision community. 

Learned-Miller, Huang, and Berg received the award for their work on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), one of the most influential face datasets in the world. Established in 2007, Labeled Faces in the Wild has been cited over 3,700 times, and used by established companies like Google and Facebook to test their facial-recognition accuracy.

"It is an honor to be associated with Mark Everingham, who was a meticulous and thoughtful scientist who had a huge impact on the field of computer vision," said Learned-Miller. "Gary, Tamara, and I created this dataset to help the research community make advances in face verification. But to a large extent, the role of LFW as a 'challenge problem' is over; it is too easy for many algorithms at this point. Now it is time to address many of the larger societal challenges that come with face-recognition technology, including fairness, privacy, and intelligent guidelines for its use. Many of us at UMass and elsewhere are now working hard to address these problems."

Learned-Miller is currently working on an initiative to regulate the use of face recognition technology and to minimize the harm it could cause based on algorithmic bias and other risks.