Dr. Kari Pulli

vp computational imaging

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short:

Kari has led research teams at NVIDIA Research (Senior Director) and at Nokia Research (6th Nokia Fellow) on Computational Photography, Computer Vision, and Augmented Reality. He headed Nokia's graphics technology, and contributed to many Khronos and JCP mobile graphics and media standards. Kari holds CS degrees from Univ. Minnesota (B.Sc.), Univ. Oulu (M.Sc., Lic.Tech.), Univ. Washington (PhD); and an MBA from Univ. Oulu. He has taught and worked as a researcher at Stanford, Univ. Oulu, and MIT.

long:

Kari has worked a long time with algorithms that create, interpret, or refine pixels, both on imaging, computer vision, and computer graphics.

At NVIDIA Research (2011-14) he was Senior Director and created and lead the Mobile Visual Computing research team, working on Computational Photography for new imaging features, SLAM for AR and other CV tasks, multi-modal camera-based user interfaces for car driver assistance, and Machine Learning. The team also contributed to NVIDIA's HW architecture. Kari was the acting CTO for Computer Vision.

At Nokia (1999-2011), he worked first on Computer Graphics standardization and research, headed Graphics Technology, and later created the Mobile Visual Computing research team. He was promoted to Nokia Fellow (one of the three at the time, 6th in Nokia history), the highest technical rank. He was a member of CEO's Technology Council.

Kari has contributed to many graphics and imaging standards, at Khronos (OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenKCam, and others) where he represented Nokia, NVIDIA, and continues to contribute as individual. Khronos gave the first of their "Outstanding Services" awards to Kari. Kari also worked on several mobile Java (JCP) standards, and co-wrote a book on standard Mobile 3D APIs.

Kari has produced dozens of publications, that have been cited thousands of times. He has a B.Sc. from University of Minnesota (Comp. Sci.), M.Sc. and Lic.Tech. from University of Oulu (Comp. Eng.), Ph.D. from University of Washington (Comp. Sci.), and an MBA from University of Oulu. He was a Research Associate at Stanford University (technical leader of the Digital Michelangelo Project), was a Visiting Scientist at MIT, is still Docent (adjunct faculty) at University of Oulu, and has co-taught several courses at Stanford (on Computational Photography, Computer Vision, and Computer Architecture).

At Light, Kari heads the Computational Imaging team that works on algorithms that produce beautiful images and new imaging features.