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
- pattern recognition
- neural-network modeling (robotics, perception)
- visual perception/image processing
- autonomous systems / embodied cognition
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
Awards
- IBM Faculty Award, November 2011
- IAPR Best Paper Award at ICFHR 2012, (van Oosten & Schomaker, Separability and Prototypicality)
- Ching Yee Suen Special Award 2012 for achievements in handwriting recognition
- IBM Faculty Award, 2012
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
- TOEFL test Feb. 2005: (spoken) C1, (written) C2, vocabulary (23/25: C1/C2)
- programming C (> 500kloc), Fortran (> 200kloc)