Dr. Kari Pulli

The Register article Phone designers to improve reality said

Future phones will recognize buildings and people by sight and replace reality with something better. They'll also have roll-out HD displays. Or projectors. Or they'll dock with your PC's display.
 
At least, that's the vision of some visual-computing visionaries at this week's Multicore Expo, inspired by the graphic and computing power of high-performance multicore embedded processors that will power tomorrow's smartphones.
 
Kari Pulli, who heads the Visual Computing and User Interfaces research team at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, described a prototype phone that his company has developed that visually recognizes buildings and people. The object, as he puts it, is to "make the device aware of its surroundings and react to it; to connect the digital and real world."

Kari Pulli, MSc, Ph.D., MBA is Research Fellow, Nokia and Docent, University of Oulu, Finland. He also heads the Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging research team at Nokia Research Center (NRC) Palo Alto.
 
His research interests include Mobile Augmented Reality, Computational Photography, Mobile Graphics Standards, Computer Animation, Modeling from range data, and Symbian programming. He has led lots of graphics research at Nokia and has worked on graphics APIs such as OpenGL ES, M3G, and OpenVG for mobile devices.
 
Kari coauthored Mobile 3D Graphics: with OpenGL ES and M3G (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) and Open GL ebook Collection: Ultimate CD. His papers include From a researcher to a manager: Transition and learning strategies (Or, Is it worth it and how to do it well?), Multiview Registration for Large Data Sets, SURFTrac: Efficient Tracking and Continuous Object Recognition using Local Feature Descriptors, Outdoor Augmented Reality on Mobile Phone using Loxel-Based Visual Feature Organization, The Digital Michelangelo Project: 3D Scanning of Large Statues, Fast rendering of subdivision surfaces, and Range Image Segmentation Based on Decomposition of Surface Normals. Read the full list of his publications!
 
His patents and patent applications include Three dimensional image processing, Method, Apparatus and Computer Program Product for Determining Relevance and/or Ambiguity in a Search System, Method and system for efficiently drawing subdivision surfaces for 3D graphics, Method, Device, Mobile Terminal, and Computer Program Product for a Point of Interest Based Scheme for Improving Mobile Visual Searching Functionalities, and Editing a surface.
 
He earned his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1990, his MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oulu in 1991, his Lic. Tech. in Computer Engineering from the University of Oulu in 1993, his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1995, his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1997, and his Executive MBA at the University of Oulu in 2001.
 
Kari is fluent in Finnish, English, and German. He is good in Swedish and Italian and he knows some French and Spanish.
 
Watch Viewfinder Alignment, Real-time Enveloping with Rotational Regression, Style Translation for Human Motion (Part 1), and Style Translation for Human Motion (Part 2).