The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce the appointment of Carlo Tomasi as Department Chair.

"I am thrilled that Carlo has agreed to serve as the next Chair,” says departing Chair Pankaj Agarwal. “He has already made a profound impact on the Department, and under his leadership the Department will reach the next level of excellence."

Tomasi, who taught at Stanford and Cornell University before joining the Duke faculty in 2001, is a leading researcher in the field of computer vision—the science of teaching artificial systems to analyze, interpret, and extract information from still or moving images. He has written more than one hundred papers, holds more than ten patents, and has been co-chair and committee member of numerous prestigious conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Tomasi currently works with students and collaborators around the University on a variety of theoretical and practical research projects, including a technique to analyze motion in video and a system to identify matching subjects in a group of still images and stitch them together into 3D representations. He also collaborates on several projects with Duke Medical Center, including an effort at the Duke Eye Center to develop a technology to assess the eye health of premature infants.

Tomasi will take the Department reins on July 1st. “I am looking forward to it. I love this department,” says Tomasi. “Our previous chair, Pankaj, has been extremely effective on many fronts, including fantastic new hires, several initiatives to strengthen our teaching curricula, and reaching out to new disciplines like computational economics and computational biology.”

In coming years, Tomasi hopes to continue to increase the quality and size of the Department, especially through additional hires, continued collaborations across campus and outside, and initiatives to make undergraduate CS courses useful to an even broader set of students.