Rate My Professor Bruce Draper

Bruce Draper is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University, holding an additional appointment in the Molecular, Cellular and Integrated Neuroscience program. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1984, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1993. His doctoral thesis addressed using reinforcement learning to control image understanding processes, advised by Ed Riseman, Allen Hanson, and Andy Barto. Post-Ph.D., he served as senior post-doctoral research scientist at UMass Amherst from 1993 to 1996, contributing to DARPA's unmanned ground vehicle program. In 1996, he joined Colorado State University as Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor in 2010. From 2019 to 2023, Draper took leave to serve as program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office, initiating the Perceptually-enhanced Task Guidance program for augmented reality human-AI teaming, along with efforts on adversarial AI defenses and high-dimensional machine learning geometry. He returned to CSU as Department Chair in 2023.

Draper's research specializes in computer vision and machine learning. Early work focused on outdoor color image analysis and computational models of human vision, including collaborations with NIST on face recognition evaluation and student David Bolme on visual object tracking. His team advanced FPGA mapping for image processing with Wim Bohm and Walid Najjar, and video action recognition with Trevor Darrell and Chris Geyer. Recent projects encompass DARPA's Communicating with Computers program (2015-2019), developing real-time visual emotion, gesture, and pose recognition for avatar-based non-linguistic human-AI interaction; DARPA Mind’s Eye action recognition (2012); and ARPA-H VIGIL for upskilling rural medical technicians via augmented reality (2025). Key publications include "Knowledge-Directed Vision: Control, Learning and Integration" (Proceedings of the IEEE, 1996), "Recognizing Faces with PCA and ICA" (Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2003), "The Schema System" (International Journal of Computer Vision, 1989), and "Gesture Recognition: Focus on the Hands" (CVPR, 2018). Garnering over 14,700 citations on Google Scholar, his contributions have profoundly impacted face recognition standards, object tracking, and human-AI interfaces. Draper has chaired the IAPR Technical Committee on Computer Vision (2002-2004), served as General Co-chair of CVPR 1999, and contributed to program committees for CVPR, ECCV, ICML, and others.