Charles J. Cohen, Ph.D.

VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) University of Michigan

M.S. (Electrical Engineering) University of Michigan

B.S. (Electrical Engineering) Drexel University

Dr. Cohen has been a technical lead and program manager in the fields of modeling and simulation, image processing, robotics, human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence for more than a decade. At Cybernet, he has been the project manager for many projects for the United States Armed Forces (Air Force, Navy, and Army), National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Homeland Security and other government agencies.  His projects include work on simulation, training, real-time optical pose determination, robotics, virtual reality, object identification, feature and body tracking and human performance evaluation.  

Dr. Cohen’s main area of interest is gesture recognition. For his Ph.D. thesis, and continued in R&D work for NASA, the U.S. Army, DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force, he created a system for the generation and recognition of dynamic and static gestures. The dynamic gestures were inspired by representative gestures from human-to-human control applications, and a 24-gesture lexicon was refined from a set of oscillatory motions. Each gesture was modeled as a dynamical system with added geometric constraints to allow for real time gesture recognition using a small amount of processing time and memory. He has expanded this system to recognize 3D gestures from a variety of sensor data, and has classified the combination of gestures as motion behaviors for use in surveillance and security applications.