FullView: Vic Nalwa

Vic (Vishvjit Singh) Nalwa is President of FullView, which he founded with Bell Labs in 2000 after inventing the original FullView camera there in 1995.

He skipped his senior year at St. Columba's High School, New Delhi, India to attend the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur), where he shared the First Prize for Academic Excellence in the Core Curriculum in 1981 and the B.Tech Degree as the Best Graduating Student in Electrical Engineering (EE) in 1983. He then attended Stanford University on its inaugural Information Systems Laboratory Research Fellowship, receiving from Stanford the M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in EE in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

Between Stanford and FullView, he was with Bell Labs Research, where over two summer months of 1993, he conceived an algorithm to automatically authenticate signatures written onto signature pads like those in use today. After a talk on three competing ongoing multiyear team efforts toward this goal there—by its Neural Networks, Speech and Statistics Departments—he'd speculated he could reduce their equal error rates ten-fold, which he was challenged to prove. Once he did, the President of Bell Labs Research afforded him unfettered freedom, which culminated in FullView, and he won a Bell-Labs-wide competition on applications of smart cards, as are present credit cards.

In 1989, he was concurrently on the faculty of EE at Princeton University, which led him to author A Guided Tour of Computer Vision (Addison-Wesley, 1993)—a text adopted by, among others, Stanford for its PhD qualifying exam in computer science. He's been honored for his publications and patents; he's prevailed in every intellectual-property dispute he's partaken bar none, whether as a litigant or an expert; and he's given invited talks worldwide, including at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Google, Technion, TU Delft, UBC Vancouver, IIT Delhi and INRIA SA. He was an editor of IEEE PAMI from 1994 to 1998, and he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2004.

He's a lineal descendant of Hari Singh Nalwa (1791–1837), the Sikh general best known for driving Afghan rule out of India to beyond the Khyber Pass.

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