John R. Kender

John R. Kender is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, affiliated with the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He previously served as former Vice Dean of the same school and has been recognized as a Great Teacher by the Society of Columbia Graduates and a Distinguished Faculty Teacher by the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association. His research focuses on computer vision, video understanding, gesture recognition, and artificial intelligence, supported by grants from DARPA, NSF, and industry partners like IBM and Microsoft. He has advised over 25 doctoral students and co-chaired the 2016 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR). His teaching spans courses in object-oriented design, visual interfaces, and visual databases, with a strong emphasis on project-based learning. Kender's work includes pioneering contributions to semantic video indexing, multimodal analysis, and transfer learning techniques.

• Education: Advanced degrees in Computer Science (details not explicitly stated in texts).

His research interests bridge computational methods and human-centric applications, including gesture-audience engagement correlations using EEG, cultural differences in news video production, and visual meme tracking in social media. His projects, such as the NSF-funded 'Tagging and Browsing Videos According to Affinity Groups,' highlight user-centered multimedia systems. Kender's work has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed articles and patents, addressing challenges in video segmentation, motion anticipation, and neuroimage alignment.

Recent articles explore geometric approaches to transfer learning, 3D motion prediction, and cultural analysis through computational aesthetics. These reflect a trend toward cross-disciplinary methods combining AI, computer vision, and social sciences.

• Awards: Multiple teaching recognitions, including Columbia's top faculty teaching honors.

Advising highlights include mentoring students across decades, with notable alumni contributing to academia and industry. His grants total over $10M from federal and industrial sources. Kender's lab focuses on real-world applications like educational video analysis, medical imaging, and event-driven multimedia systems. Current projects include developing explainable AI for video clustering and probabilistic GAN-based human motion prediction.