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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 all-India entrance exam taken anonymously, 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 attended Stanford University on its inaugural ISL Fellowship, receiving from it 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 ongoing multiyear team efforts by its Neural Networks, Robotics and Statistics Departments to automatically authenticate signatures signed on signature pads such as in use today, he suggested that the state of the art of these efforts, their lowest equal error rate, could be improved by an order of magnitude, tenfold. When challenged to prove this, he did, that summer. For this, the President of Bell Labs, who'd been seeking his resignation for insubordination, thereon afforded him unfettered freedom instead, which led to FullView. Also for this, he won a Bell-Labs-wide competition in 1994 on applications 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 qualify PhD candidates in artificial intelligence and computer science, as by Stanford University. He's been recognized for his patents and publications; prevailed in every patent litigation to which he's been a party or an expert; and been invited to describe his research worldwide, including by MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Google, Technion, TU Delft, IIT Delhi, HKU and INRIA SA. He was Associate Editor of IEEE PAMI over 1994 – 98 and 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
triggered
Indian independence. Another 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.
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