FullView: Vic Nalwa

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

He attended St. Columba's High School in New Delhi, where he skipped his senior year to attend the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). At IITK, 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. From Stanford, he received the M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in EE in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

Between Stanford and FullView, he was with Bell Labs Research, whose work is widely recognized. Over two summer months there, in 1993, he conceived an algorithm to automatically authenticate signatures written onto signature pads like those in use today. His algorithm outperformed by a factor of ten—that is, its equal error rate was an order of magnitude lower than—three competing ongoing multiyear team efforts at Bell Labs Research, by its Speech, Neural Networks and Statistics Departments. After he'd speculated at a talk that such an improvement was possible, he was challenged to prove it. And when he did, the President of Bell Labs Research thereon afforded him unfettered freedom, which led to FullView. Also for the same work, in 1994, 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 has won recognition for his publications and patents; prevailed in every intellectual-property dispute he's partaken, whether as a litigant or an expert; and has 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 on the Editorial Board of IEEE PAMI from 1994 to 1998 and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2004.

He's a lineal descendant of Hari Singh Nalwa (1791-1837), who drove Afghan rule from India—where chess was born c. 500 AD—to behind the Khyber Pass.

Site Map · Home

About · Technology · Applications · Products · Gallery