Jana Košecká facts for kids

Jana Košecká is a smart Slovak computer scientist. She is an expert in something called computer vision, which is like teaching computers to "see" and understand images. She works as a professor of computer science at George Mason University. Before this, she was a researcher at famous universities like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Her Journey in Computer Science

Jana Košecká studied electrical engineering and computer science at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. For her master's degree, she wrote about how artificial intelligence could be used in farming.

Discovering Robotics

Later, she heard a talk about robotics by a scientist named Ruzena Bajcsy. This made her very interested in robots! She then went to the University of Pennsylvania to study more. In 1996, she earned her Ph.D. there, with Ruzena Bajcsy as her main teacher and guide. Her Ph.D. project was about how to design and test "visually guided agents," which are like robots or computer programs that use cameras to understand the world around them.

Working with Big Companies and Self-Driving Cars

After her Ph.D., Jana Košecká spent three years at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she researched how computer vision could be used for self-driving cars. Imagine cars that can "see" the road and other cars all by themselves! During this time, she also visited Stanford University. She also held visiting positions at big companies like Google and Nokia Research.

Today, she is a professor at George Mason University, where she continues to teach and research exciting topics in computer science.

Important Book

Jana Košecká helped write a book called An Invitation to 3-D Vision: From Images to Geometric Models. She wrote it with other smart scientists: Yi Ma, Stefano Soatto, and S. Shankar Sastry. This book helps people understand how computers can create 3D models from regular pictures.

Awards and Recognition

Jana Košecká and her co-authors (Yi Ma, Stefano Soatto, and S. Shankar Sastry) won a special award in 1999. It was called the Marr Prize. They won it for their important paper about how computers can rebuild 3D scenes from images.

She was also a main speaker at a big event in 2018 called the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. This shows that she is a respected expert in her field!