Temple University computer science professor Dr. Longin Jan Latecki (center, facing camera) speaking about his research with colleagues and students.

If you ever want a robot to be able to get you coffee, they have to be able to see.

So, really, Dr. Longin Jan Latecki, a computer science professor at Temple University, is doing us all a favor. Latecki, whose research focuses on the half-century-old concept of computer vision, is one of 22 Temple faculty who are participating in the university’s inaugural Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP).

The program gives students the chance to earn up to a $4,000 stipend, funded by an equal match between the College of Science and Technology and the researcher’s grant.

Latecki is originally from Poland and is one of two professors working on more than one project for SURP. He came to Temple in November 2001, after stints at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Hamburg, both in the storied German university community.

SURP, which includes faculty from Temple’s CST, the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine, aims to bolster the research chops of Temple undergraduates. More than 270 students applied for the program, and some 150 interviewed with faculty for just 40 available positions during a university event held on March 31.

Below, Latecki, who is also leading a project on the interaction of light with matter, talks to Technically Philly about SURP, his computer vision research and what it takes to get a robot to get me some damn coffee.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Talk to us about your academic pursuits.
My main research area is computer vision, finding ways to understand images the way humans do and to do it by intelligence testing… We’re in the age of digital photography, so getting digital images into a computer is easier than ever, but understanding what is in the image, well there still is a lot of work done to be done there. You can find a car or chair in an image [with] no problem, but computer software is still not there. Computers do a lot of things better, but in basic cognitive abilities, they still don’t match what humans can do.

Tell us about SURP and your involvement.

I have a research grant from the National Science Foundation and the college [of science and technology] that lets you apply for this supplement, this [matching grant]. …Our dean supports research for undergraduates, and I can really support this program… so I got involved. The main change is to really get undergraduates exposed to, to get them a better understanding of challenging problems. Whatever we do, we get them thinking and researching like a graduate or more… Three students work with me for 15 weeks. They started May 18 and work until the end of August. That way they can understand better what I’m doing and really contribute and learn something.

Explain your SURP project like I was a 10-year-old.
[Laughs] The key idea is to, well, if you have a computer algorithm that is supposed to give a computer human-like ability to detect and recognize images, how do you test the algorithm to make sure what it is supposed to do is what it does? You have [a] standard test data set. It would be there, say 1,000 images, 100 of a car, 100 of a chair 100 of another object and so on, and you have the computer ask what is this image, and you measure to see if it got correct. We are testing, yes, but the problem is that if you just take those photos and the computer doesn’t do a good job, you don’t know why.

If you generate computer images and have that computer evaluate, you have control of… whether the camera picture was missed because the image was too bright or whatever else, because all of those features are very important.

It is very useful to find out if something didn’t go well just as much as what did go well. Meanwhile, we just learned the best algorithms for object recognition [by seeing what didn't work]. When this stage is reached, we try to analyze the main problems when the algorithms fails, why it fails. With human vision, we are not really aware of the process. When you look for an object of whatever, [we] do it nicely. Our human vision can do it well… but computers still can’t. We want to figure out… what are the biggest problems.

Why is this research important?

This is very important… for the future of robotics. The main resource for humans is vision. Most of our brain power goes into visual input and analyzing it. This is the main window into how we see the whole world. So if you want robots running around doing useful things, we need to give them useful vision abilities. This is something very necessary for the future. You may find shortcuts for controlled environments to let [artificial intelligence] develop without vision through some other means, but this is not a robot that can go get a cup of coffee for you.

Tell us about the undergraduate students on your team.

The selection process was very nice[ly] organized through the dean’s office. The matching program is more suitable for putting undergraduates on the job, ones who go through an interview process and are recommended by other professors, which was a two to three-month process. … I am now working with three students with different strengths. They all have a background in mathematics… one is strong in math and computer sciences with some software development, another student is stronger in software development and one student does very nice independent work separate from any specific field… It’s about advancing research and learning, and it’s a chance to mentor them, give them a taste of real applied research, with the grants and a real end goal.

So, what is the goal for this project at the end of this first SURP session?
Whether I achieve it is another question, but if I can really get an understanding of the real challenges of evaluating state of the art object detection and recognition, this will be a great success … This research has 50 years of history, in trying to get computer[s] to analyze images, to get computers to understand. This is not research known to the public because, well, there are not so many useful systems [using the research]. This is something for the future.

Watch a Stanford professor discuss groundbreaking computer vision research in 1971

You’ve come from some prestigious European research communities. Can you discuss Temple and Philadelphia’s technology research community, particularly in computer sciences or robotics?

I think it’s a great environment. Starting in 2000, before I got [to Temple], the university’s computer information sciences department… started growing as a research institution. Meanwhile, since 2008, more researchers have been hired, and we are all working in data mining, machine learning and computer vision. We have a very nice research environment with a lot of interactions within Temple University.

And this is a city of interaction, with places like the information sciences at Penn. Also, we have… interaction with researchers at other departments inside this university. This is definitely a good place to be. The leading research [on computer vision] is done in the U.S. You can see this in Philadelphia. This is a very research active area, particularly in computer science… I’m happy to be here.

[Full Disclosure: The author of this story is a 2008 graduate of Temple University.]

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Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia�s technology community. See others here.

Photo of Optimus Prime prowling Penn's campus from SlashFilm.com, as linked at bottom.

Technology lovers at the University of Pennsylvania had at least two points of pride this week, a ranking and an act of good works.

Computerworld released its annual 100 Best Places to Work in IT list, naming Philadelphia’s Ivy League school No. 4, ranking it the best for benefits and second for diversity.

It comes near a university announcement that researchers from the school’s Graduate School of Education plan to introduce laptop computers and a technology-based curriculum to students and teachers in a rural community school for the children of coffee-farm workers in Nicaragua, beginning in July.

The Computerworld list gave Penn a glowing reference, a portion of which includes the following:

This Ivy League university wanted to improve security for its community following the tragic events at Virginia Tech. Toward that end, the IT group collaborated with the school’s public safety group to develop an “instant alert” system. The IT staff worked to find technologies to meet the university’s requirements, incorporated additional features, developed an infrastructure that does double-duty by also disseminating non emergency updates and hosted the system off-site with redundancy. IT also kept costs down by leveraging an existing technology.

Warm words for a university launching a three-year research initiative at the Buenos Aires School, which will examine issues surrounding closing the digital divide. The research will also document how using a technology-based curriculum can impact a school environment, student learning, and dynamics of school, family and community dynamics. The data will be used as a model for replication in similar settings elsewhere in Central America.

The list included other regional companies, including No. 43-ranked Lehigh Valley Health Network of Allentown, No. 67-ranked The Vanguard Group of Malvern and North Broad Street’s own Temple University, ranked 90th, as reported by Philly Tech News, including others that have a significant presence here.

Image courtesy of Slash Film.

Updated: 5:33 p.m. 6/10/09 with additional attribution

This is part of an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

On a Friday afternoon in early May, Leah Kauffman dons a t-shirt to show off her gang affiliation.

A pair of hands screenprinted on the bright red tee are positioned similarly to the Bloods street gang hand signal. Fingers on the right hand are contorted into the shape of the letters ‘b,’ ‘l’ and ‘o.’ The left hand is flipped upside-down, and the index finger curled, creating a hanging “g.”

‘Blog,’ it reads.

At first glance, it’s easy to miss. But it makes sense. Kauffman runs Philly.com’s Phrequency, a news portal that covers the movers, shakers and rattlers of Philly’s music community.

In April, Phrequency was redesigned with a more streamlined, blog-esque interface; dropping the clunky, genre focus that forced users to choose hip-hop or punk, R&B or jazz, for a content-oriented design that doesn’t split hairs on artists who span all of those.

It was a move that Kauffman had wanted to make for months.

Phrequency.com dropped genres to streamline the process and better associate with new acts that are hard to classify.

“The reality is that people are not searching for music by genre. People are not classifying themselves [and they're saying] ‘I’m not just hip hop or punk.’ From a management standpoint, it’s insanely difficult to program eight pages of genres,” she says, seated in a conference room on the 35th floor of Five Penn Center in Center city.

Since launching in November, Phrequency has been quietly drumming up an audience of music aficionados and bringing together a community that didn’t have a local online portal before the site came along, she says.

“We have one of the biggest talent pools in America, some of the best studio musicians. We’re totally underserved by local media. There was a real void to fill.”

Kauffman, a Temple University graduate, made headlines last year with her viral video project “Obama Girl,” a set of tongue-in-cheek videos made in support of Barack Obama’s 2009 presidential campaign. Her song “Crush On Obama,” for which Kauffman sang vocal tracks behind on-screen performer Amber Lee Ettinger, has racked up 14.2 million YouTube hits.

Having gained a few new contacts, Kauffman pitched the idea of Phrequency last year to former Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who left the company in May to head digital operations at Comcast Sports Group, as the Philadelphia Business Journal reported and we mentioned in an earlier Comcast Roundup.

“[I knew] that a newspaper would be a perfect organization to start something like this and that Phrequency could help Philly.com reach a younger audience,” she says.

Along with a web development team, she began storyboarding the site design, looking to magazines like Nylon for inspiration. After it launched and as the site developed, Kauffman began to realize that the original plans needed adjustment. Seven months later, it was goodbye genres, hello blog.

Kauffman says that the site has been improved with better embedable widgets and updated from Yahoo’s Maven video platform to the industry-standard Brightcove video player. Videos are a popular part of the site, she says, and photos are more strongly integrated with the new format.

The whole editorial process is streamlined. Instead of having to feed an entire photo gallery with pictures, copy and captions, an author can drop a picture that speaks for itself directly into a blog post; that was something the old content management system didn’t allow.

Kauffman says that the blog format provides a less intimidating, linear accessibility to readers. “There is something about a blog post that is friendly, gives you a little more personality,” she says. “People our age look at blog posts and understand it’s casual,” she says.

It’s even helped get content out there faster.

In late April, speedy posting helped the site break a story about alleged police brutality that Philadelphia pop-punk band Valencia documented after a show at the Theater of Living Arts on South Street, as we reported.

See the video from after the show below.

Since launch, Kauffman says that there’s been a “big change” in the way people are interacting with the site. They’re commenting more and linking more often.

Of course, it might be Kauffman’s connection with other online media outlets in the music community that could be driving some of those links.

Phrequency has been reaching out to local blogs like Mikey McFly, Vanache and Late Night Wall Flower to foster the community and expand its audience reach. In April, it partnered with local arts and culture magazine McJawn to host a show at Northern Liberties-based Silk City.

“There’s a new generation of young, positive bloggers in the city that say ‘if we stick together, we can make Philadelphia better,” she says. “Everyone’s trying to make it and trying to create art that’s meaningful to them and to an audience. That’s something we can all share.”

When major Philadelphia Web sites change, Technically Philly will find out why in The Redesign. Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

A slew of big names were named to the advisory board of the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship to Youth.

All told, 13 new members were appointed, including former RedLasso CEO Kenyon Hayward, RoseAnn B. Rosenthal, the longtime president of Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, and Temple University President Ann Weaver Hart, according to a press release.

The regional incarnation of the New York City-based nonprofit is headquartered at Temple and follows the group’s mission of providing entrepreneurship education programs to young people from low-income communities.

Other members named to the advisory board include Douglas A. Alexander, president of the Internet Capital Group and former chief of Linkshare and Traffic.com; Peter J. Boni, CEO of Safeguard Scientifics, and Milan Patel, the chief of global technology firm ACS International Resources.

The other members are Andrew Jordan, an assurance partner with Ernst & Young; Andrew Kaplan, a financial adviser with UBS Financial Services; Carolyn Oakley Lowe, the managing director of DHR International’s Philadelphia office; Chris Pavlides, an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Temple University’s Fox School of Business; Steve Sanders, co-founder of First Genesis Financial Group; Sally Solis-Cohen, the director of business development for the eastern division of Vistage International and Kathleen Thomas, senior vice president for Bank of America’s global commercial bank.

Hayward of RedLasso, Rosenthal of BFTP, Weaver-Hart of Temple and Solis-Cohen of Vistage all live in Philadelphia. The others are from the ‘burbs.

Since 1987, NFTE claims to have reached more than 230,000 young people and trained more than 4,200 certified entrepreneurship teachers. NFTE currently has programs in 22 states and 13 countries.

Staff writer Brian James Kirk contributed to this report.