VASCO acquired all of the stock of Cronto in exchange for an initial cash consideration of Euro 15 million and contingent cash consideration in the form of an earn-out of up to a maximum of Euro 2 million.

VASCO expects that Cronto will contribute greatly to VASCO’s future innovation efforts, due to its knowledge and expertise in advanced statistical data analysis and machine learning algorithms that underpins high speed and reliability of image based transactions and due to its close ties with the University of Cambridge.

The paper on “Automatic behavior descriptors for psychological disorder analysis” is joint work with colleagues at the University of Southern California. Marwa is a research student in the Graphics & Interaction research group under the supervision of Peter Robinson.

Professor Sir Tony Hoare delivers Wheeler Lecture

A packed lecture theatre greeted Professor Sir Tony Hoare who got proceedings underway and delivered the annual Wheeler Lecture titled ‘Could Computers Understand Their Own Programs?’.

The event also marked the launch of Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years, written by Professor Haroon Ahmed. The book charts the Laboratory’s towering history of innovation and entrepreneurship from the EDSAC computer to Raspberry Pi.

Professor Andy Hopper (right) presents Dr Mike Lynch with a commemorative certificate

Professor Haroon Ahmed launches the publication of Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years

The theme of innovation was underlined by Dr Mike Lynch OBE who delivered the Innovation Lecture.

The afternoon’s events concluded with the Innovation Discussion Panel, chaired by Professor Andy Hopper. Attendees were able to quiz panelists Dr Andy Harter (co-founder and CEO RealVNC), Dr Mike Muller (co-founder and CTO ARM), Dr Mike Lynch (co-founder Autonomy Corporation) and Dr Eben Upton (co-founder Raspberry Pi).

(L to R) Mike Lynch, Mike Muller, Andy Hopper, Andy Harter, Eben Upton

Celebrations continued into the evening at the annual dinner of Cambridge Computer Lab Ring, the Lab’s graduate association. 114 guests filled The Old Hall at Queens’ College to raise a glass to the Computer Laboratory and its next 75 years.

Professor Andy Hopper presents a copy of Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years to guest speaker Lord Broers

Professor Peter Robinson accepts the award for Publication of the Year from Lord Broers

Tadas Baltrušaitis, Peter Robinson and Louis-Philippe Morency have won the Publication of the Year award at the Cambridge Ring’s annual dinner for their paper on “3D Constrained local model for rigid and non-rigid facial tracking” presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June 2012.

The research integrated depth information with web-cam pictures to provide improved tracking of facial features.  Tadas Baltrušaitis is supervised by Peter Robinson and the work was carried out in collaboration with Louis-Philippe Morency at the University of Southern California.

See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/projects/clmz/ for details.