Greetings! I am Nathaniel Bird, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the beautiful University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My advisor is Nikos Papanikolopoulos. I should graduate in 2009. I am currently a research assistant with the Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Vision Laboratory, specifically the Monitoring Human Activity subgroup.

My thesis research is on high-precision, vision-based human body tracking. The motivating problem is the helical tomotherapy machine, a medical device that is used to perform conformal radiation therapy. To accurately target the radiation, the patient must be where they are expected to be. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to track the patient's position and articulation while treatment is underway. My thesis work attempts to close the loop by visually tracking the patient's entire body surface precisely enough to maintain accurate targeting.

Most of my research deals with vision-based human tracking and monitoring. I worked to develop a large vision-based human activities monitoring system for the Department of Homeland Security, comprising of over 100 cameras and many detected behaviors. Prior to that, I worked on a project to detect when motorists engaged in distracting behavior. Finally, I developed a system to detect loitering individuals in public transportation areas.

In summer 2008, I was a program co-coordinator with fellow graduate student Duc Fehr for the Technology Day Camp, a free day camp program put on by the lab for underprivledged local middle schoolers to get them interested in robotics, technology, and college in general. We did many fun activities like programming using Alice, soldering together robotic bugs the kids took home, programming the Aibo robots to dance, and holding a "Robot Olympics" using our lab's Scout robots. It was a lot of fun and a very rewarding. We are currently in the planning phase for the summer 2009 iteration of the camp.