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

At 16, based on an annual anony­mous­ly-taken all-India entrance exam — 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 five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). At IIT Kanpur, he won the First Prize for Academic Excellence in the Core Curriculum in 1981, 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 inaugural ISL Fellow­ship, the M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1987) Degrees in EE.

Between Stanford and FullView, he was with Bell Labs Research. After a talk there in 1993 that desc­ribed three comp­et­ing multi-year efforts — 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 two summer months, after wrap­ping up the book below. The Presi­dent of Bell Labs, who was seek­ing his resig­nat­ion for in­sub­ord­inat­ion for focusing on this book, there­on afford­ed him un­fett­ered free­dom instead, which led to FullView. Also for this, he won a Bell-Labs-wide comp­et­it­ion on uses of the now-standard "chip" on credit cards.

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), joined the Sikh Army at 14, rose to lead it, and is widely mythologized for driving Afghan Rule out of India to beyond the Khyber Pass, building a fort at its mouth that he died defending.




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