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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 that alone — 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 attending a technical talk there in early 1993 that described three competing efforts, ongoing for years, by teams from its Neural Networks, Statistics and Robotics Research Departments to automatically verify 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, that summer — after wrapping up a book he was writing. For this, the President of Bell Labs, who'd been seeking his resignation for insubordination, thereon afforded him unfettered freedom — which led to FullView — and in 1994, 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 honored 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 at UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Google, Technion, TU Delft, IIT Delhi, HKU and INRIA SA. He was Associate Editor of IEEE PAMI over 1994 – 98 and he was elected Fellow of IEEE in 2004.
His father, a
midshipman in WWII at 16, was court martialed in 1946 for the
Royal Indian Naval Mutiny, which
led to
India's independence from England. Another lineal ancestor,
Hari Singh Nalwa (1791–1837) — who joined the
Sikh Army at 14, rose to lead it, and was governor of
Kashmir — is
widely mythologized for routing the
Afghan Empire from the
Indian Subcontinent.
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