FullView: Vic Nalwa

Vic (Vishvjit Singh) 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.

He attended St. Columba's High School, New Delhi, India, where he skipped his senior year to attend the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India. At IIT Kanpur, he received The First Prize for Academic Excellence in the Core Curriculum in 1981, and he received the B.Tech. Degree as The Best Graduating Student in Electrical Engineering in 1983, both jointly. He then won the inaugural Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) Research Fellowship at Stanford University, from where he received 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. There, upon a dare, over the summer of 1993, he designed and implemented a system for Automatic On-Line Signature Verification whose equal-error rate was less than a tenth that of three different competing systems developed over several years at Bell Labs Research, by its world-renowned Statistics, Speech, and Neural Networks Departments. For this effort, he won a Bell-Labs-wide open competition in 1994 and was thereon afforded complete freedom of research 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 on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Trans-actions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has published several well-known academic papers, received numerous patents and academic honors, and given invited talks at several well-known academic institutions, among them, in alphabetical order, CMU, Dartmouth, Harvard, IIT Delhi, INRIA SA, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, SUNY SB, Technion, TU Delft, U British Columbia, UC Berkeley, U Illinois, U Maryland, U Penn, U Rochester, USC and Yale.

Finally, he is a direct descendant of the tactically brilliant Indian Sikh general Hari Singh Nalwa (1791-1837), best known for defeating the Afghans repeatedly, even when outnumbered more than ten to one, annexing large swaths of their kingdom and curtailing their rule from then on to behind the fabled Khyber Pass.