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Gerald Sommer
University of Kiel
Membership Number: 32
Address: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Informatik, Preusserstr. 1-9,D-24105 Kiel, Germany.
Email: gs@informatik.uni-kiel.de
Phone: +49 (431) 5604-70
Fax: +49 (431) 5604-81
URL: http://www.ks.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~gs/

Biographical Sketch
Gerald Sommer (1945) is a full professor for Computer Science and head of the Cognitive Systems Group at the Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel. He holds a diploma (1969) and a PhD. (1975) degree in physics from the University of Jena/Germany and a habilitation (1988) degree in engineering from the Technische Universitaet Ilmenau/Germany. Since 1975 he was working on several projects of medical image analysis. From 1991 to 1993 he was head of the division for medical image processing at the research center GSF-Medis in Muenchen. In 1993 he established the Cognitive Systems Group at the new founded Technical Faculty in Kiel. He is mainly interested in basic principles of designing technical systems with performances comparable to biological ones. The main focus lies on the interaction of visual perception of action and its impact on system architectures by following the behaviour-based design paradigm. Another upcoming focus of research is directed to the study of advantages which can be gained from the use of Clifford algebra to enhance the representation performance in multidimensional signal theory, computer vision, robotics, and neural computing. He supervised numerous doctoral and diploma theses. He is author and coauthor of more than 200 papers as well as editor and coeditor of several volumes, proceedings and special issues. He is founder of the international conferences Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) and Algebraic Frames for the Perception-Action Cycle (AFPAC)and organizer of several international and national conferences. G. Sommer is member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Image and Graphics and member of the advisory board of Machine Graphics and Vision. Dr. Sommer got awards from the German Pattern Recognition Society in 1997, 2000 and 2002.

Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel (CAU) - Cognitive Systems Group
The Cognitive Systems Group at the Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel was founded in 1993 and is part of the Institute of Computer Science at the Technical Faculty. Major expertise of the research group is in the fields of multi-dimensional signal representation and processing, neural network learning, robot control, computer vision, geometric algebra, and vision-based robot control. The scientific aim is to study the tight relations between visual perception and action by following the behaviour-based approach of system design. A lot of basic and applied research results have been achieved and are published at international conferences, journals, and books. The group established a completely new direction of research with respect to the algebraic embedding of the perception-action cycle, and enforced the use of neural computing to learn behaviours in robot vision. Projects on face recognition with steerable filters, steerable filters for image sequence processing, vision-based tracking of faces for man-machine-interaction, vision-based construction of indoor-maps, design of architectures for neural computing, computer vision and robotics in geometric algebra, and others, have been performed. International cooperations exist with universities of Linkoeping, Auckland, Perth, Philadelphia, Bejing, Cambridge, Samara, Tel Aviv, Technion Haifa, and with industrial companies. The group organized three international conferences (CAIP'97, AFPAC'97 and AFPAC 2000) and one national conference (DAGM 2000).

For the thematic network ECVision the key persons at the Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel are Prof. Dr. Gerald Sommer and Dr. Christian Perwass.


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