Spotlight: Derek Anderson

Derek Anderson
Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The question of what you did last summer might get a ‘good’ or ‘okay’ from the average Joe, but not when it comes to Derek Anderson. As a recipient of the John D. Bies International Travel Award, Derek was able to attend the 2009 International Fuzzy Systems Association Conference in Lisbon, Portugal this past summer. “The trip was wonderful,” Derek says. If you’re wondering what exactly a fuzzy set is, Derek breaks it down. “Fuzzy set theory and approximate reasoning are branches of uncertainty theory that help with problems plagued by imprecision, vagueness, measurement error, etc, in other words, the grey area.”

Getting to where he is now all started as an undergraduate with art, academic and soccer scholarships. “I wanted initially to either be an artist or acquire a degree in accounting,” Derek says. “However, in my first two years of courses I was blown away by one course in programming and another in mathematics. I became obsessed with mathematical analysis as well as the ability to control computational systems and make them carry out my desires. The real selling point occurred when I took a course in Artificial Intelligence.”

After finding his calling, Derek is now a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His true passion lies in computer vision and computational intelligence, meaning machines that can see and think. Derek explains what his research entails.

My primary research topic is linguistic summarization of human activity from video. Essentially, this is the problem of making computers describe, in a natural language, what they see. I am applying this theory to the privacy protected assessment of the “well-being” of elders, namely alert detection. For example, if an elder falls then someone needs to be immediately notified and help dispatched.

Apart from his research, Derek has also had the pleasure of teaching. With seven years under his belt, he finds teaching fulfilling and an interesting process. “You are not only teaching the students, but learning from them as well as they all have different perspectives and bring new ideas,” Derek says.

As someone who understands the teaching process, he is very grateful for the guidance he’s found through his advisors. “Jim Keller has been very influential in my career as he is why I stayed to get my Ph.D. to study under him,” Derek says. “The research opportunities under people like Dr. Keller and the financial support from scholarships and grants are what allow me the ability and willingness to work each day.”

(Story and photo by Samantha Abbott)