Dr. Christopher R. Wren

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in Lectures:
Tutorial on Ambient Intelligence at ISSNIP 2007, Melbourne, December 2007.

in Workshops:
"Workshop on Massive Datasets" as part of ICMI. November 2007.

In Conferences and Honors
Best Paper for:
"Visualizing History of Living Spaces" Ivanov, Wren, Sorokin, and Kaur. IEEE InfoVis. October 2007.

In Conferences and Honors
Best Presentation for:
"SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building" Wren, Ivanov, Kaur, Leigh, and Westhues. LoCA. September 2007.

In Exhibits
"Buzz: Measuring and Visualizing Conference Crowds" Wren, Ivanov, Leigh, Westhues, Buchin, Tian, and Turaga. SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies, August 2007.

In the News:
New Scientist April 2008.
Visualization: Just Look What's Coming TDWI mentions the AmbInt project. November 2007
New Scientist ran a story on the AmbInt project. April 2007.

Principal Research Scientist
January 2001 - present
Research Scientist (2001-2007)
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, USA
Invention of perceptual and context aware systems for human interface and automation. Design and creation of novel perceptual technologies.

Senior Perceptual Engineer
Perceptive Network Technologies, Inc., Waltham, MA, USA
March 2000 - January 2001
Founding member of a perceptual sciences company dedicated to bringing context-aware communication technologies to the desktop, to help users manage converging information technologies.

Research Assistant
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge, MA, USA
Media Laboratory, Vision and Modeling Group
August 1994 - March 2000
Designed, built, and evaluated artificial perceptual systems for human-computer interface and situation awareness. Managed junior graduate students, staff, and undergraduate researchers. Presented papers, invited talks, and live demonstrations at conferences. Developed perceptual tool kits (Pfinder, STIVE, and Dyna) used internationally by many academic and research institutions. Extensive interaction with the media and senior officers of corporate sponsors.

Engineer and Dynamicist
Boston Dynamics Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA
June 1993 - August 1994
Design and programming work in dynamics, graphics, contact modeling, and animation. Extensive experience with systems ranging from supercomputers, to embedded controllers. Work on electric and hydraulic force-feedback systems, and magnetic position-sensing systems. Developed many physics-based simulations including: robots, elevators, frogs, and humans. Consulting environment with tight deadlines for international clients in academics, research, industry, and the military.

Research Technician
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Media Laboratory, Advanced Human Interface Group
October 1989 - June 1993
Programming and systems support for research on non-traditional interface technology. Innumerable small projects and several larger projects including a pattern recognition system for eye movement and a scripted, networked, object-oriented graphics system that pre-dated similar commercial systems such as SGI Inventor.

Doctor of Philosophy.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Thesis Title: "Understanding Expressive Action."
Minor: "Stochastics, Dynamics, and Recursive Filtering."

Master of Science.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Thesis Title: "Pfinder: Real-Time Tracking of the Human Body"

Bachelor of Science
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Thesis Title: "Dynamic Simulation of Large Systems: Trees Blowing in the Wind."
Minor: Cognitive Psychology.

Secondary Education.
Western Reserve Academy, Hudson, OH, USA

IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, Best Paper, October 2007.

3nd Location and Context Awareness , Best Presentation, September 2007.

2nd Location and Context Awareness , Best Presentation, May 2006.

Pfinder article in PAMI passes 1500 citations (1000 on January 2006).

Google Scholar Top-ranked paper for the following search phrases:

• tracking (November 2004 - May 2005).
• real-time tracking (May 2005 - present).
• dynamic human motion (November 2004 - present).
• purposeful motion (November 2004 - present).
• perceptual entertainment (November 2004 - May 2006).

Citeseer paper rankings:

• 951st most cited computer science article of all time (June 2004)
• 27nd most cited computer science article from 1995 (January 2006).
• 18th most cited computer science article from 1997 (July 2004)

• Association for Computing Machinery: elevation to Senior Member status, 2006
• IEEE Computer Society: elevation to Senior Member status, 2005
• Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society: elevation to Full Member status, 1999
• Tau Beta Pi
• Eta Kappa Nu
• Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board

Guest Lecturer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Brain and Cognitive Sciences 2002 - present
Guest lecture on "Tracking" for the course "Pattern Recognition for Machine Vision".

Instructor
Harvard University, Division of Continuing Education, Cambridge, MA, USA
Extension School
2002 - 2006
Co-teach "E5: Introduction to Applied Computer Science" and "E282: Statistical Techniques for Audio and Video Processing". The E5 course is general interest and is taken by a wide variety of students. The E282 course is part of a Master degree program.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Mentor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Media Laboratory Supervised undergraduate researchers engaged research projects as individuals and small groups up to five students. Responsible for project design, daily advice, and evaluation.

Laboratory Teaching Assistant
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
6.004 - Computation Structures
Assisted students building and debugging computers and evaluated comprehension of lab exercises.

Association for Computing Machinery, Senior Member

IEEE Computer Society, Senior Member

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, Member

"Functional Calibration for Pan-Tilt-Zoom Cameras in Hybrid Sensor Networks". Christopher R. Wren, U. Murat Erdem, Ali J. Azarbayejani. ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, Special Issue on Multimedia Surveillance Systems. Volume 12, number 3. December 2006. DOI Link . (updated version of MERL TR2005-084)

"Similarity-based analysis for large networks of ultra-low resolution sensors". Christopher R. Wren, David Minnen, and Srinivas G. Rao. Pattern Recognition, volume 39, issue 10, pp. 1918--1931. Special Issue on Similarity-Based Pattern Recognition. Elsevier. October 2006. DOI Link . (also MERL TR2005-003)

"Perception for Human Motion Understanding," Christopher R. Wren. in Machine Learning and Robot Perception Vol. 7 in the series: "Studies in Computational Intelligence." Edited by Apolloni, Ghosh, Alpaslan, Jain, and Patnaik. Published by Springer. 2005. pp. 265-324. Springer Link (also Vismod TR 527)

"Minimalism in Ubiquitous Interface Design", Christopher R. Wren and Carson J. Reynolds. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, September 2004, 8(5), pp. 370-373. Springer Link (also MERL TR2002-22)

"Perceptive Spaces for Performance and Entertainment: Untethered Interaction using Computer Vision and Audition." Christopher R. Wren, Flavia Sparacino, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Trevor J. Darrell, Thad E. Starner, Akira Kotani, Chloe M. Chao, Michal Hlavac, Kenneth B. Russell, Alex P. Pentland. Applied Artificial Intelligence, June 1997, 11(4), pp. 267-284. Taylor&Francis Link (also Vismod TR 372)

"Pfinder: Real-Time Tracking of the Human Body." Christopher R. Wren, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Trevor Darrell, and Alex P. Pentland. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, July 1997, 19(7), pp. 780-785. IEEE Link (also MIT Thesis)

"Citizen Mappers Use MassGIS Geospatial Web Services" MassGIS GISette February 2008, page 2.

"SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building" talk at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA, USA. January 2008.

"Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings" Tutorial to be presented at the Third International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing. December 2007.

Workshop on Massive Datasets Organized by Christopher R. Wren and Yuri A. Ivanov as part of ICMI., November 2007. Proceedings

"Sensor Networks for Better Buildings" Google TechTalk, Mountain View, CA, February 2007. video

"Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings" University of Nagoya Seminar, Nagoya, Japan, August 2006.

"Boosted Haar Wavelets for Sensor Networks" Christopher R. Wren and Yuri A. Ivanov. The Learning Workshop 2006 invited presentation. April 4-7 2006. Snowbird, Utah.

"Using sensor networks for action recognition"
NIPS 2005 Workshop on Recognition and Discovery of Activities and Interactions. Whistler, BC, Canada, December 2005.

"Activity Mining in Sensor Networks"
NIPS 2004 Workshop on Activity Recognition and Discovery. Whistler, BC, Canada, December 2004.

"Finding Structure in Pedestrian Flow."
Boston University Vision Group Lecture Series. Boston, MA, USA, December 2003.

"Finding Structure in Pedestrian Flow."
University of Washington Computer Science Lecture Series. Seattle, WA, USA, October 2003.

"Finding Structure in Pedestrian Flow."
Microsoft Research Ubiquitous Computing Seminar. Redmond, WA, USA, October 2003.

"Minimalism in Ubiquitous Interface Design."
Georgia Institute of Technology GVU Lecture Series. Atlanta, GA, USA, September 2002.

"Models for Human Motion."
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Math Department Seminar. Hawthorne, NY, USA, June 1, 2001.

"Learning Gestures and Words for Individualized, Adaptive Interfaces." Alex P. Pentland, Deb Roy, Christopher R. Wren. Human Computer Interface International 1999 Special Session on Gesture Interaction, Munich, Germany, August 24, 1999. ACM Link

"Perceptive Spaces for Performance and Entertainment (Revised)." Christopher R. Wren, Flavia Sparacino, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Trevor J. Darrell, James W. Davis, Thad E. Starner, Akira Kotani, Chloe M. Chao, Michal Hlavac, Kenneth B. Russell, Aaron Bobick, Alex P. Pentland. ATR Workshop on Virtual Communication Environments: Bridges over Art/Kansei and VR Technologies, Kyoto, Japan, April 13, 1998. ATR Link

"The Smart Room, Its Status and Future Research." Tele-Immersion Workshop, Chicago, IL, USA, October 23-24, 1996.

"Buzz: Measuring and Visualizing Conference Crowds" Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues, Mariela Buchin, Tai-Peng Tian, and Pavan Turaga. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies, San Diego, CA, USA. August 2007.

"Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings" Yuri Ivanov, Christopher Wren, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues, Alexander Sorokin, Ishwinder Kaur. Demonstrations track of the 2006 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, Vancouver, Canada, December 4, 2006.

"Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings" Yuri Ivanov, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues, Christopher R. Wren. Mitsubishi Electric Internal Technology Roadshow. Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. August 2006.

"Interacting With Projections Using iLamp Projectors." Paul Beardsley, Shane Booth, Clifton Forlines, Ramesh Raskar, Jeroen Van Baar and Christopher R. Wren. ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Emerging Technologies, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 2004.

"Wearable City of News." Flavia Sparacino, Steve Schwartz, Christopher R. Wren, Richard W. DeVaul, Glorianna Davenport, Alex P. Pentland. ACM SIGGRAPH 1999 Millennium Motel, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 1999.

"Shall We Dance." Kazuyuki Ebihara, Jun Ohya, Thanarat Horprasert, Ismail Haritaoglu, David Harwood, Larry S. Davis, Christopher R. Wren, Alex P. Pentland. ACM SIGGRAPH 1998 Enhanced Realities, Orlando, FL, USA. July 1998

"Toco the Toucan." Deb Roy, Tony Jebara, Christopher R. Wren, William Tomlinson, Alex P. Pentland. ACM SIGGRAPH 1997 Electric Garden, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 1997

"Smart Spaces." Ali J. Azarbayejani, Christopher R. Wren, Andrew Wilson, David Becker, Nuria Oliver, Deb Roy, Flavia Sparacino, Francois Berard, Alex P. Pentland. ACM SIGGRAPH 1996 Digital Bayou, New Orleans, LA, USA. August 1996

"Dreams and Illusions." Trevor Darrell, Bruce Blumberg, Michael P. Johnson, Christopher R. Wren, Pattie Maes, Alex P. Pentland. ACM SIGGRAPH 1995, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 1995

"Trans-Atlantic SURVIVE." Thad Starner, Kenneth Russell, Christopher R. Wren, Martin R. Friedman, Alex P. Pentland. 1994 Schools Lecture, BT Laboratories, Martlesham, England, October 1994.

"Soda Pop Zombies: Soft Drink Consumption and Motion" Daniel Wigdor, Yuri A. Ivanov, Christopher R. Wren. Proceedigns of the 2007 ICMI Workshop on Massive Datasets. , ISBN: 978-1-59593-871-8978. Nov. 2007 (DOI, TR2007-081))

"Visualizing History of Living Spaces" Yuri A. Ivanov, Christopher R. Wren, Alexander Sorokin, Ishwinder Kaur. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, ISSN: 1077-2626, Vol. 13, Issue 6, pp. 1153-1160, Nov-Dec 2007 ( IEEE Xplore, TR2007-068))

"SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building" Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov, Ishwinder Kaur, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues. Third International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness. September 2007. Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. DOI MERL TR2007-034

"Buzz: Measuring and Visualizing Conference Crowds" Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov, Darren Leigh, Jonathan Westhues, Mariela Buchin, Tai-Peng Tian, and Pavan Turaga. ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Emerging Technologies, San Diego, CA, USA. August 2007. DOI TR2007-035))

"Tracking People in Mixed Modality Systems" Yuri Ivanov, Alexander Sorokin, Christopher Wren, Ishwinder Kaur. Visual Communications and Image Processing 2007. February 2007. San Jose, California. Link. (also MERL TR2007-011)

"Toward Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks" Christopher R. Wren and Emmanuel Munguia Tapia. Second International Workshop on Location- and Context-Awareness. 10-11 May 2006. Dublin, Ireland. DOI Link. (also MERL TR2006-011)

"Worse is Better for Ambient Sensing" Carson J. Reynolds and Christopher R. Wren. Pervasive 2006 Workshop on Privacy, Trust and Identity Issues for Ambient Intelligence. May 7th, 2006. Dublin, Ireland. (also MERL TR2006-005)

"Toward Spatial Queries for Spatial Surveillance Tasks" Christopher R. Wren and Yuri A. Ivanov. Pervasive 2006 Workshop on on Pervasive Technology Applied Real-World Experiences with RFID and Sensor Networks. May 7, 2006. Dublin, Ireland. (also MERL TR2006-051)

"Automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom Calibration in the Presence of Hybrid Sensor Networks", Christopher R. Wren, Murat Erdem, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Third ACM International Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks, Singapore, November 11, 2005. (also MERL TR2005-084)

"Change Detection by Frequency Decomposition: Wave-Back", Fatih Porikli, Christopher R. Wren. Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services, April 2005. (also MERL TR2005-034)

"Large Networks of Ultra-low Resolution Sensors in Buildings", Christopher R. Wren. International Conference on Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 373-389, April 2005. (also MERL TR2005-003)

"Waviz: Spectral Similarity for Object Detection" Christopher R. Wren, Fatih Porikli. IEEE International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance. Breckenridge, CO, USA. January 2005. (also MERL TR2005-004)

"Interactive Projection" Paul Beardsley, Clifton Forlines, Ramesh Raskar, Jeroen Van Baar and Christopher R. Wren. ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Emerging Technologies, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 2004.

"Finding Temporal Patterns by Data Decomposition."David C. Minnen and Christopher R. Wren. IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Seoul, Korea, May 2004. (also MERL TR2004-054)

"Self-configuring, Lightweight Sensor Networks for Ubiquitous Computing." Christopher R. Wren and Srinivasa Rao. International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 205-206, Seattle, WA, USA. September 2003. (also MERL TR2003-024)

"Parsimony & Transparency in Ubiquitous Interface Design." Christopher R. Wren and Carson J. Reynolds. International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 31-33, Göteborg, Sweden, September 2002. (also MERL TR2002-022)

"Browsing 3-D spaces with 3-D vision: body-driven navigation through the Internet City" Flavia Sparacino, Christopher R. Wren, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Alex P. Pentland. Proceedings of 3DPVT: 1st International Symposium on 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission, Padova, Italy, June 19-21 2002 (also SensingPlaces TR)

"Volumetric Operations with Surface Margins." Christopher R. Wren, Yuri A. Ivanov. IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Technical Sketches, Kauai, HI, USA. December 2001. (also MERL TR2001-047)

"Combining Audio and Video in Perceptive Spaces." Christopher R. Wren, Sumit Basu, Flavia Sparacino, Alex P. Pentland. First International Workshop on Managing Interaction, Dublin, Ireland, December 1999. (also Vismod TR 511)

"Understanding Purposeful Human Motion." Christopher R. Wren and Alex P. Pentland. 1999 IEEE International Workshop on Modeling People, Kerkyra, Greece, September 20, 1999 (also Vismod TR 485)

"City of News." Flavia Sparacino, Richard DeVaul, Christopher R. Wren, Ronald MacNeil, Glorianna Davenport, Alex P. Pentland. SIGGRAPH Visual Proceedings, Los Angeles, CA, USA. August 8-13, 1999

"Augmented Performance in Dance and Theater." Flavia Sparacino, Christopher R. Wren, Glorianna Davenport, Alex P. Pentland. International Dance and Technology, Arizona State University, Feb. 25-28, 1999.

"Digital Circus: a computer-vision based interactive Virtual Studio." Flavia Sparacino, Christopher R. Wren, Glorianna Davenport, Alex P. Pentland IMAGINA, Monte Carlo, Monaco, January 18-20 1999.

"Real-time 3D Motion Capture." Thanarat Horprasert, Ismail Haritaoglu, David Harwood, Larry S. Davis, Christopher R. Wren, Alex P. Pentland. Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, San Francisco, CA, USA, November 4-6, 1998

"Dynamic Modeling of Human Motion." Christopher R. Wren and Alex P. Pentland. Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Nara, Japan, April 14-16, 1998 (also Vismod TR 415)

"Perceptive Spaces: Learning Dynamic Models of Human Behavior." Christopher R. Wren, Sumit Basu, Alex P. Pentland. Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces, Banff, Canada, October 19-21, 1997 (also Vismod TR 416)

"Improvisational Theater Space." Flavia Sparacino, Kristin Hall, Christopher R. Wren, Glorianna Davenport, and Alex P. Pentland. The Sixth Biennial Symposium for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA, February 27 - March 2, 1997.

"Real-time 3-D Tracking of the Human Body." Ali J. Azarbayejani, Christopher R. Wren, Alex P. Pentland. Proceedings of IMAGE'COM 96, Bordeaux, France, May 1996 (also Vismod TR 374)

"Pfinder: Real-Time Tracking of the Human Body." Christopher R. Wren, Ali J. Azarbayejani, Trevor Darrell, and Alex P. Pentland. Second IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Killington, VT, USA, October 1996. (also Vismod TR 353)

"HyperPlex: a World of 3D Interactive Digital Movies." Flavia Sparacino, Christopher R. Wren, Alex P. Pentland, Glorianna Davenport. Proc. of IJCAI'95 Workshop on Entertainment and AI/Alife. Montreal, Canada. pp. 77-81. August 1995. (also Vismod TR 322)

United States Patent 7,415,164 "Spectral Similarity for Object Detection." Wren and Porikli.

United States Patent 7,359,836 "Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks". Wren and Munguia Tapia.

United States Patent 7,302,369: "Traffic and Geometry Modeling with Sensor Networks." Wren.

United States Patent 7,242,421: "Communications based on perceptual sensing of presence." Center, Wren, Basu, and Gusyatin.

United States Patent 6,911,995: "Depth segmentation with virtual surface margins" Ivanov, Pentland, and Wren.

United States Patent 6,680,745: "Videoconferencing method with tracking of face and dynamic bandwidth allocation." Center and Wren.

United States Patent Application: "Determining Geometries of Scenes" Ivanov, Thornton, and Wren.

United States Patent Application: "Probabilistic Graphs on Surveillance Data." Wren, Ivanov, Sorokin, and Kaur.

United States Patent Application: "Tracking and Identifying Objects in Environments." Ivanov, Sorokin, and Wren.

United States Patent Application: 20070257986 "Method For Processing Queries For Surveillance Tasks". Ivanov, Sorokin, and Wren

United States Patent Application 20060284971: "Composite Surveillance Camera System". Wren, Azarbayejani, and Dietz.

United States Patent Application 20060238618: "Context Aware Surveillance System Using a Hybrid Sensor Network" Wren, Erdem, and Azarbayejani.

United States Patent Application 20050256817: "Efficient Hierarchical Decomposition of Temporal Patterns." Wren and Minnen.

United States Patent Application 20020113687 : "Method of extending image-based face recognition systems to utilize multi-view image sequences and audio information." Center, Wren, and Basu.