last byte

I M A G E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E S C H O O L O F C O M P U T E R S C I E N C E , C A R N E G I E M E L L O N U N I V E R S I T Y

mans. But I didn’t feel like that the human body is an optimum system. Bodies have to deal with everything from seeing to eating to surviving. But when you isolate a particular capability, there should be a better way to do it. Moreover, at that time, we didn’t know much about how the body works. I’m a practical person, so I thought that by understanding the underlying physical, geometrical, and statistical principles, we should be able to design a good system. These days, I see the advantage of learning from biological systems, now that we understand them a little better and have the tools to recreate them.

In 1980, after several years of teaching
at Kyoto University, you moved to the
U.S. to become a professor at Carnegie
Mellon University. Why?

I felt it was a kind of intellectual adventure. At that time, computer science was very different in the U.S. than in Japan—the environment, the way people talked … I visited CMU in 1977, and I still remember seeing Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon in the terminal room at midnight, talking with students while he waited for his results from the printer. It was out of my imagination.

In the mid-1980s, you began your
pioneering research into the field of
autonomous vehicles. What sparked
your interest?

It was something of a historical accident. We had a fairly big contract from

DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research
don’t give out any hits. My Ph.D. thesis
program was complete, but not perfect;
that’s why I’m still working on it.

To create this system, you drew inspira-
tion from origami and geometry, rath-
er than from human vision.

I was not against learning from hu-

TAKEO KANADE HAS spent his career trying to help computers understand what is around them. The robotics pioneer joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1980, and his computer vision research underscores everything from medical robotics technology to self-driving cars. This year, to his long list of accolades, he adds the Kyoto Prize.

You’ve been working in computer vision
since you were a graduate student at Kyo-
to University. What drew you to the field?

I did my undergraduate work in electrical engineering in the late 1960s, which was the dawn of computer science in Japan. There was no computer science department at that time, but I was impressed with a talk I heard from a professor who was using computers for what he called non-numerical computation. Nowadays, we might call it artificial intelligence—it was very pioneering work in speech recognition, image processing, and translation.

For your Ph.D. thesis, you developed
the world’s first complete face recogni-
tion system.

You said the first “complete.” Indeed, that is the word—it was a real system, including everything from the very first step digitizer to an image-pro-cessing program, all the way to a display device that I made from a Sony TV. It was written in assembler language. You know, in baseball, a complete game is when you pitch from the first to the ninth inning. In a perfect game, you [CONTINUED ON P. 143]

DOI: 10.1145/3005682 Leah Hoffmann

Q&A
A View to the Future

Takeo Kanede, recipient of the 2016 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology for pioneering contributions to computer vision and robotics, sees respect as an important part of Quality of Life Technology initiatives.