Carnegie Mellon University adjunct professor and Robotics Institute alumnus Henry Schneiderman and UA and Helen Whitaker Professor of Computer Science and Robotics Takeo Kanade have won the 2008 Longuet-Higgins Prize. The award is given annually at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for prior work considered novel at the time of publication that continues to be influential and has stood the test of time.

Their paper titled "Probabilistic Modeling of Local Appearance and Spatial Relationships for Object Recognition," written a decade ago, was cited as "a significant advance in object recognition through probabilistic modeling and multiple-view training, yielding a state-of-the-art face detection technique."

Schneiderman and Kanade each received a certificate and will share the $2,000 prize.

Schneiderman, who received his doctoral degree in robotics in 2000, served as full-time research faculty from 2000- 2004, and is currently adjunct faculty while serving as CEO of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a local company he co-founded in 2004, that is developing state-of-the art technologies for finding, tracking and recognizing faces and other objects in images and video.

Kanade, whose many honors include the Franklin Institute's $250,000 2008 Bower Prize, Japan's Okawa Prize and the C&C Award, served 10 years as director of the Robotics Institute. He currently directs the National Science Foundation's Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center, which was established in 2006. In addition, he is the founding director of the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo, which aims to measure and model human functions for use in designing human-centered systems.