Ružena Bajcsy is an American computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley,[1], where she is also Director Emerita of CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Science).
She was previously Professor (and Chair) of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Director (and founder) of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, and a member of the Neurosciences Institute in the School of Medicine. She has also been head of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, with authority over a $500 million budget. At Pennsylvania, she supervised at least 26 doctoral students who received the Ph.D.[2]
Bajcsy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine as well as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
She received a Master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, and an additional Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University. Her thesis was "Computer Identification of Textured Visual Scenes", and her advisor was John McCarthy.[2]
In 2001, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. She has also received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award, the ACM Distinguished Service Award, and the Computing Research Associates Distinguished Service Award in 2003. From 2003–05, she was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. The November 2002 issue of Discover named her to its list of the 50 most important women in science.[3] She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.[4]
She has written over 225 articles in journals and conference proceedings, 25 book chapters, and 66 technical reports and has been on many editorial boards.
Her current research centers on artificial intelligence; biosystems and computational biology; control, intelligent systems, and robotics; graphics and human-computer interaction, computer vision; and security.
Bajcsy's most current research has helped her gain recognition from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Ružena Bajcsy received the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for her innovations in robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images.