Gerald Friedland

Gerald Friedland (born 1978, Berlin) is an adjunct professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Of the University of California, Berkeley and a Principal Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He also maintains an affiliation with the International Computer Science Institute.

Education

Gerald Friedland completed his Masters and Doctorate degrees in computer science from Free University of Berlin in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His PhD advisor was Raúl Rojas. He then moved to the International Computer Science Institute where he completed his a postdoc under Nelson Morgan before continuing to be a research scientist and group leader there.

Career

Friedland is a computer scientist specializing in the processing and analysis of multimedia data and machine learning. He is mostly known as the original author of the widely used "Simple Interactive Object Extraction" image and video segmentation algorithm, created as part of his PhD thesis, and as the co-author of the current textbook on Multimedia Computing. He also led the initiative to create and release the YFCC100M corpus (see also: List of datasets for machine learning research), the largest freely available research corpus of consumer-produced videos and images. He co-founded the field of geolocation estimation for images and videos, sometimes also referred to as placing. Friedland also frequently uncovers privacy risks in multimedia publishing practice and heads the development of the teachingprivacy.org portal which provides educational materials for use in US high-schools as part of the AP Computer Science Principles and the Code.org initiative. Friedland is also the co-creator of MOVI, an open-source speech recognition board that allows the creation of cloudless voice interfaces for Internet of things devices.

His most cited paper on YFCC100M and the multimedia challenges around it is being cited at a rate of more than two citations per week according to Google Scholar.

Awards

2015: Winner Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia Grand Challenge
2015: Bay Area Maker Faire Editor’s Choice Award
2009: Winner Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia Grand Challenge
2007: IEEE CS Distinguished Service Award
2002: European Academic Software Award
2000: Gründerpreis Multimedia of the German Ministry of Finance and Technology
1998: Winner Jugend forscht Berlin (Mathematics and Computer Science)