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Vic (Vishvjit Singh) Nalwa is President of FullView, which he cofounded in 2000 with Bell Labs, where he invented the FullView camera in 1995, which he demonstrated to Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride in Manhattan in 2000.

At 16, based on an annual anony­mous­ly-taken nationwide exam in India — and nothing else, to preclude tribalism, puffery, and corruption — he skip­ped his senior year at St. Columba's School for the 240-odd fresh­man class at one of the then 5 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). At IIT Kanpur, he won the First Prize for Academic Excellence in the Core Curriculum in 1983 and he was its Best Graduating Student in Electrical Engineering ("EE") in 1983, both with two others. He then received from Stanford University, on its sole inaugural ISL Fellow­ship, the M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1987) Degrees in EE.

He was then a Principal Investigator at Bell Labs Research, whose staff has won 10 Nobel Prizes, including one for CCD cameras. After a talk there in 1993 that desc­ribed 3 comp­et­ing efforts spanning several years — by teams from its Neural Net­works, Stat­istics, and Rob­ot­ics Dep­art­ments — to auto­mat­ic­ally auth­ent­icate sig­nat­ures signed on sig­nat­ure pads such as ubiquit­ous today, he sugg­ested that the state of the art of these efforts, its equal error rate, could be imp­rov­ed by an order of magnitude, ten­fold. When chall­eng­ed to show how, he did, over 2 summer months, but only after wrap­ping up the book below. The Presi­dent of Bell Labs, who'd been seek­ing his resig­nat­ion for in­sub­ord­inat­ion for focusing on this book, there­on afford­ed him un­fett­ered free­dom instead, which led to FullView. Also for this, in 1994, he won a Bell-Labs-wide comp­et­it­ion on uses of a "chip" on a credit card.

In 1989, he was concurrently on the faculty of Princeton University, which led him to write A Guided Tour of Computer Vision, Addison-Wesley, 1993, a text used to teach, train, and qualify Ph.D. students in Artificial Intelligence ("AI") and Computer Science ("CS"), as at Stanford University. He's been re­cog­nized for his patents and publications, prevailed in every patent liti­gat­ion to which he's been a party, and been invited to describe his research world­wide — as by UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, CMU, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Google, Technion, TU Delft, IIT Delhi, HKU, and INRIA. He was Associate Editor of IEEE PAMI over 1994 – 98 and was elected Fellow of IEEE in 2004.

His dad, a midshipman in WWII at 16, was court martialed in 1946 for the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny, which led to India's independence. Another lineal ancestor, Hari Singh Nalwa (1791–1837), who joined the Sikh Army at 14 and rose to lead it, is widely mythologized for driving Afghan Rule from India to beyond the Khyber Pass, building a fort at its mouth he died defending.




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