Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
at 5:30PM

In this talk we will cover several topics of importance to graduate students: overview of research and projects activities at SFSU Computer Science Department; overview of basic research methodology and culminating experience project requirements; overview of opportunities at SFSU Center for Computing for Life Sciences. After this talk graduate students will have better idea what is required for culminating projects, how to write the final culminating experience report, what projects are available etc.

Dr. D. Petkovic obtained his Ph.D. at UC Irvine, in the area of biomedical image processing. He spent over 15 years at IBM Almaden Research Center as a scientist and in various management roles. His contributions ranged from use of computer vision for inspection, to multimedia databases and digital libraries. He is the founder of IBM's well-known QBIC (query by image content) project, which significantly influenced the content-based retrieval field. Dr. Petkovic received numerous IBM awards for his work and became an IEEE Fellow for leadership in the content-based retrieval area. Dr. Petkovic also managed and participated in several other projects while in IBM, among them User Ergonomics Research (involved in IBM's TrackPoint pointing device), and Foundations of Massively Parallel Computing.

In the last few years, Dr. Petkovic had various technical management roles in Silicon Valley startups, the latest (VMware) involving virtual computing on Intel Platform. Some of the products Dr. Petkovic helped build won numerous awards and are widely used. He has also taught at Santa Clara University. Currently, Dr. Petkovic is the chair of the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University.