About the Author

Steven George Goodridge was born July 29, 1969 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended grammar school in Suffield, Connecticut and high school in Londonderry, New Hampshire. Steven received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Systems from the University of New Hampshire in 1991, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1994. His professional interests include distributed real-time computing, digital audio and video, autonomous robots, fuzzy control systems, and biologically-inspired artificial intelligence. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Tau Beta Pi. Steven's favorite pastimes include bicycling, fencing, boating, and shopping at the hardware store.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my sincere appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Ronald S. Gyurcsik, who showed me how to look at education and research from both personal and career perspectives, and helped me stay on track to complete this work. I also wish to thank Dr. Michael G. Kay for his enthusiastic support and expertise in intelligent sensing research, and Dr. James J. Brickley, whose door was always open for me and who advised me when no one else knew quite what to do with me. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Ren C. Luo for giving me the chance to do research in robotics and intelligent systems, and to Dr. John Sutton, who introduced me to fuzzy logic and gave me the opportunity to start my research in intelligent multimedia systems.

I wish to convey my appreciation to Dr. Caglan M. Aras, Mr. Jack Lucas, and Mr. Scott deDeugd at IBM for the opportunities they provided for me to work and do research in the multimedia field. I would also like to thank my fellow students who have helped me, most remarkably Mr. Jay Russell, who helped port a variety of image processing functions to the PC.

I thank George Lucas and Isaac Asimov for their inspiring fictional robots, which started my mind down this path at a very young age.

Finally, I would like to thank Lauren and my parents for their love and support.