Curriculum Vitae


Lambert Schomaker (19-2-1957) received his M.Sc. degree in psychophysiological psychology in 1983 (cum laude), and his Ph.D. degree on "Simulation and Recognition of Handwriting Movements" in 1991 at Nijmegen University, The Netherlands. Since 1988, he has been working in several European Esprit projects concerning the recognition of on-line, connected cursive script on the basis of knowledge on the handwriting movement process. He was the project coordinator of a large European project on multimodality in multimedial interfaces (project MIAMI), and has enjoyed collaborative research projects with several industrial companies. Current projects are in the area of image-based retrieval, on-line and off-line handwriting recognition, forensic writer identification, and cognitive robot navigation models. Apart from research, his duties involve teaching courses in artificial intelligence and pattern classification. prof. Schomaker has been involved in the organization of several conferences on handwriting recognition and modeling. He has organized the Seventh International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition in the year 2000 in Amsterdam. He has been the chairman of TC-11/Reading Systems of the Int. Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), chairman of the Int. Unipen Foundation for benchmarking of on-line handwriting recognizers, member of the IAPR TC5 committee on Benchmarking and Software. He is member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IAPR and the BNVKI. Within the Netherlands he has been member of Advisory Board of the NICI institute Nijmegen, is member of the Advisory Boards of the J.F. Schouten School for User-System Interaction, Eindhoven, and the USI postgraduate school of the TU/e. He was member of the ToKeN2000 and the Catch programme committees of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) and the Shell/FOM Computational Science and Energy Research program. He has contributed to over 160 peer-reviewed publications in journals and books. Per 1/1/2001 he has accepted the position of full professor in AI at Groningen University, The Netherlands, as director Research & Education. As the ALICE department (Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Engineering) grew from 5fte in 2001 to 35fte in 2009, he is now the scientific director of this research institute at the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. The work of prof. Schomaker is cited in 13 US and 10 international patents. He was involved in several valorisation projects, with as notable examples a series of EU Esprit projects with Olivetti computers and the Active Book Company as well as dedicated grants from industry (Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft). His work on neural networks for handwriting and gesture recognition is a precursor to modern handwriting and gesture-recognition methods on tablet computers such as the iPad. He is currently active in a 30 MEuro multidisciplinary valorisation project ('Target') in mass-storage, high-performance computing and datamining, in order to implement the Monk generic search engine for handwritten historical archives.

Current Interests

The Monk system is unique, world wide, due to its huge scale, genericity and its use of live ('24/7') machine learning. In 2016, the Monk system contained over 400 million images of handwritten words, from over three hundred historical documents and several tens of thousands trained word classes, continuously refined by new dedicated recognition and retrieval schemes using shape features for handwriting and user labeling. The availability of thousands of example images for single classes of complex patterns has brought pattern recognition and machine learning into a new ballpark: big data.

Scientific visibility

as of Sept. 2016 #articles #citations #cit/ranked paper h-index
Google Scholar 168 4881 29.1 39
ISI/Thomson RID 162 984 15.6 19
ISI/WOS 39 740 18.97 17

Awards

Grants

2015 - Mantis H2020 - 3xx kEuro
2015 - Making sense (NWO)
2015 - Himanis - 1xx kEuro
2014 - Digging into data
2012 - NWO/middelgroot - MPS medieval paleographic scale - coapplicant with Jan Burgers - 326 kEuro
2009 - Target project - Monk: word retrieval in handwritten collections - coapplicant, overall project size 30MEuro, of which 300 kEuro
2006 - NWO/OC EW - Morph (Learning to Learn) - main applicant - 272 kEuro
2004 - NWO/ToKen TriGraph - Trimodal writer identification - main applicant - 370 kEuro
2004 - NWO/Catch - Scratch - Script retrieval - main applicant - 537 kEuro
2002 - Wanda (Fish2) - coapplicant with Katrin Franke - 187kEuro
2001 - NWO/ToKeN I2RP - intelligent information retrieval and presentation - main applicant - 681 kEuro
1997 - Vergelijk - NFI forensic writer identification - main applicant - 41kEuro
1995 - Esprit project MIAMI (multimodality & multimedia) - main applicant/coordinator - 1.4MEuro
1993 - HP/Bristol and NICI/Nijmegen - Writer variation in handwriting recognition - 100kEuro
1991 - Esprit Papyrus - coapplicant with Hans-Leo Teulings - 757kEuro

Education

1991 Ph.D. on simulation and recognition of handwriting movements
1983 M.Sc., cum laude, Physiological Psychology
1975-1983 Psychology, specialism Physiological Psychology
1969-1975 Gymnasium B, St. Odulphuslyceum, Tilburg
1963-1969 primary school, Albertus Magnus school, Goirle

Employment

2001-now Full professor Artificial Intelligence, scientific director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute (ALICE) at Groningen University, The Netherlands
1998 Research Coordinator Cognitive Engineering/NICI
1994-2000 Assistant Professor Cognitive Science/Nijmegen University
1993-1994 Researcher and local coordinator of AIM project Camarc, Biomedical diagnostics (NICI)
1991-1993 Researcher Esprit P5204 "Papyrus": Handwriting Recognition (NICI)
1988-1990 Researcher/Scientific programmer Esprit P419 "Image and Movement Understanding" (NICI)
1984-1988 ZWO researcher (project "Een model van de schrijfbeweging") at NICI
1983 Research Assistent Physiological Psychology, Tilburg University

PhD students

Direct and indirect involvement in PhD projects and dissertations

MSc. students

Supervision of MSc. projects

Private

My wife, Monica Vriens is a creative and talented painter. My daughter, Judith Schomaker is a postdoc researcher in cognitive neuroscience.

Aptitudes