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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.
“I see the advantage
of learning from
biological systems,
now that we
understand them
a little better and
have the tools
to recreate them.”