FullView: Vic Nalwa

Vic (Vishvjit S.) Nalwa is President of FullView, which he cofounded with Lucent Technologies in 2000. He invented the original FullView camera at Bell Labs in 1995, in recognition of which he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2004.

After his Junior Year at St. Columba's High School, New Delhi, India, he attended the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India, from where he graduated with the B.Tech. Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1983. At IIT Kanpur, he won The First Prize for Academic Excellence in the Core Curriculum in 1981, and was subsequently The Best Graduating Student in Electrical Engineering in 1983, both jointly. He then received Stanford University's inaugural Information Systems Laboratory Fellowship, graduating from Stanford with the M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

From 1987 to 2000, he was a Principal Investigator at Bell Labs Research, where over the summer of 1993, he pioneered Automatic On-Line Signature Verification — creating a system whose equal-error rate was less than a tenth that of three different competing multi-year multi-person efforts at Bell Labs Research, these efforts by its renowned Statistics, Speech and Neural Networks Departments. For this work, which won a Bell-Labs-wide competition in 1994, he was thereon afforded unfettered professional freedom by the President of Bell Labs, freedom that culminated in the launch of FullView in 2000. In 1989, he was concurrently on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University.

He is the author of the text A Guided Tour of Computer Vision, Addison-Wesley, MA, 1993. From 1994 to 1998, he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has published several well-known academic papers, received numerous well-known patents and academic honors, and given invited talks at numerous well-known academic institutions, among them, in alphabetical order, CMU, Dartmouth, Delft IT, Harvard, IIT Delhi, INRIA, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, Technion, U British Columbia, UC Berkeley, U Illinois, U Maryland, U Penn, USC and Yale.