bridges vol.13, April 2007 / News from the Network, Austrian Researchers Abroad
by John J. Pederson
Robert Adler, 1913-2007
Robert Adler, one of the world's greatest scientists, born in Vienna, Austria, passed away peacefully in Boise, Idaho, USA, on February 15, 2007, at the age of 93. He is survived by his loving wife and helpmate, Ingrid.
Dr. Adler's technical achievements and contributions are well documented in his nearly 200 US patents, the numerous honors and awards he received, and his many technical publications. Many of his inventions in widely diverse technical fields found their way into the products of Zenith, the pioneering American consumer electronics company where he worked for nearly six decades. His inventions were also incorporated into products of his post-Zenith clients and into competing products of others from time to time. He is widely remembered as the inventor of Zenith's wireless ultrasonic Space Command TV remote control, which revolutionized TV viewing in the United States and around the world. But his simple humanity, personal strength of character, and outstanding leadership skills were his most memorable traits.
Robert, or Bob as he was often known by his peers and business associates, was a gentle, modest, patient, selfless and soft-spoken man of unimposing appearance and demeanor. He had a uniquely comprehensive knowledge of the laws of physics, and his avid appetite for reading, along with the extraordinary scope of his scientific genius, enabled him to assimilate new discoveries and advances into his personal knowledge repertoire almost instantly. He had outstanding mentoring and teaching skills and a natural talent for finding an acceptable middle ground between conflicting hypotheses or viewpoints.
bridges vol. 13, April 2007 / News from the Network: Austrian Researchers Abroad
by Roland Schneider
mp3 download Robots nowadays can do a lot of things that normally only humans can do. They mow the lawn, build cars, and some of them can walk like we do, or even play soccer (maybe even better than we do ...). Over the past 50 years, robots were "taught" by their human inventors to imitate their creators' abilities. Still, they lack one of our most important abilities through which we recognize and interact with our surroundings - Vision.
"More than 50 percent of the human brain is dedicated to vision, that gives a pretty clear indication of its complexity," Prof. Cornelia Fermueller explains while sitting in her office at the University of Maryland in College Park (UMD).
Cornelia Fermüller
Ms. Fermueller, who holds a PhD in the area of Vision and Geometry from the Vienna University of Technology (1993), has been working as a research scientist at the Center for Automation Research in the Computer Vision Laboratory at UMD since 1994. For more than 10 years, Ms. Fermueller's research has focused on one particular issue: understanding how the human vision system works, and applying those findings to create an artificial vision system that has navigational capabilities and, eventually might even have recognition capabilities.
Discovering the secrets of vision
One might frivolously assume that vision is a rather simple task. After all, humans do it every day so effortlessly, and even camera-equipped cell phones are able to take pictures of objects.
A very popular fallacy - the exact opposite is the case: While it is indeed fairly simple to record images of our surroundings, it is very hard to understand those images and react accordingly.
Fermueller explains in basic terms what her field of visual navigation in computer vision and robotics is all about: "Imagine a robot that wanders through the world and as humans have eyes the robot has cameras. Just as a human, or animal, acquires images with his eyes, and the brain processes these images to arrive at an interpretation of the visual world, the cameras on the robot acquire images, which a computer processes. And my task now is to investigate and to understand what these computations are."
Vision: physiological
process of distinguishing, usually by means of an organ such as the
eye, the shapes and colours of objects.
[Encyclopedia Britannica]
The complexity of vision arises from the fact that while the world has
a three-dimensional geometry, images are two-dimensional. Human vision
works with the light bouncing off surfaces to interpret the world. The
human "imaging device" is the innermost layer of the eye, the so-called
retina, which is light-sensing. It converts light into electrical
impulses that are interpreted by the brain as vision by decoding these
images into information. Fermueller explains where she and her research
group face the challenge: "Although it is well understood from the
neurosciences that different parts of the brain are devoted to
different visual modalities, such as color, shape, movement, or
boundaries, we still have to figure out how to combine these different
sources of information to arrive at an interpretation of the world."
"I did not have a grand plan to really become a virologist. I more like slid into it..." says Peter Palese - head of the department of microbiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, member of the American Academy of Sciences, corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Science, member of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee, editor of the Journal of Virology, public opinion leader when the world faced SARS in 2004, author of about 300 publications - one of the pioneers of modern medical research. Even without a grand plan, it seems that Peter Palese has slid into quite something...
"It is all about opportunities"
"One can advance in the United States in a very effective way professionally, without any politics." Palese recaps his past 36 years in the US, having received numerous awards and honors such as the presidency of the American Society of Virology in 2004 and the Robert Koch Award, which was awarded with €100,000 in 2006, to name only recent ones.
"Forty years ago, the difference between what one could achieve in Austria or in the US was even more pronounced," he explains. "At the Department of Microbiology at Mount Sinai, I became a full professor when I was only 33 years of age, something unthinkable in Austria at that time. I would have had to join a political party to get anywhere close. Here no one asks you about any political affiliation."
bridges vol. 13, April 2007 / News from the Network: Austrian Researchers Abroad
In its "moves & milestones" section, bridges presents career steps and other outstanding events in the professional lives of Austrian scientists and scholars in the US and Canada.
Karl Hess was appointed to the National Science Board (NSB) in 2006 by US president George W. Bush. The National Science Board serves as advisory body for the President and the Congress, and establishes policies for the National Science Foundation.
Hess has been a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (electrical and computer engineering and physics since 1977); since June 2006, he has been a professor emeritus.
He has received an honorary Doctor of Sciences from the ETH (Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology) Zürich, Switzerland, as well as a number of national and international awards including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) J. J. Ebers Award, the IEEE Sarnoff Technical Field Award, and the Hein-rich Welker Memorial Award.
Martin Nowak published another paper in Science magazine (http://www.sciencemag.org) in December 2006 in which he enunciates and unifies the mathematical rules for the five understood bases - kin selection, direct and indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection - of the evolution of cooperation.
In his paper, he suggests that evolution is constructive because of cooperation, which is the secret behind the open-endedness of the evolutionary process, and that we might add "natural cooperation" as a third fundamental principle of evolu-tion alongside mutation and natural selection.
Martin Nowak is director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University.
bridges vol. 13, April 2007 / News from the Network
The OST network of Austrian scientists & scholars abroad was
established by the Office of Science & Technology (OST) at the
Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, and focuses on the outreach of
government-related agencies to Austrian scientists in North America.
Its main objective has been to support the scientific community with
information and specific advice wherever necessary and requested.
Encouraged by the OST, an independent association - ASciNA (Austrian
Scientists and Scholars in North America) - was founded in 2002 with
local chapters being established all over the US and Canada. For
further information about ASciNA please visit www.ascina.at.
bridges vol. 13, April 2007 / News from the Network: Austrian Researchers Abroad
by Ines Pree
In this age of "Googling," seeking for funding information has become easier and less cumbersome. Finding the right information that fits you, however, is another story . . . For those who say, like Picasso, "I do not seek. I find," www.grants.at is the virtual place to go in order to find exactly the grant you want.
Integrated into the Researcher's Mobility Portal Austria (www.researchinaustria.info), grants.at is Austria's most comprehensive database for scholarships and research funding.
So wherever you come from - and, even more importantly, wherever you want to go to - simply type in keywords or select search options to tailor the grant to your requirements. grants.at does the searching for you and directly transfers you to all available funding, only one click away from application forms, deadlines, etc.
grants.at is financed by funds from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research (BMWF) and the EU. Julia Tschelaut from the BMWF enlightens bridges in the following interview about its worldwide funding opportunities, the implementation, and the surveillance of this database.
"I did not have a grand plan to really become a virologist. I more like slid into it..." says Peter Palese - head of the department of microbiology at 
was appointed to the National Science Board (NSB) in 2006 by US president George W. Bush. The National Science Board serves as advisory body for the President and the Congress, and establishes policies for the National Science Foundation.
