Alexei Efros, associate professor of robotics and computer science, has been awarded a three-year Finmeccanica Career Development Chair.

Since 1989, the Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica has an endowed a chair to support outstanding young faculty members in the School of Computer Science. For the first time, however, the endowment is now supporting two simultaneous chairs- one filled by Efros and another that was filled last year by Carlos Guestrin, associate professor of machine learning and computer science.

"Alexei and his students have been doing amazing research on image analysis and generation," said Randal E. Bryant, SCS dean. Their feats include converting single, two-dimensional images into 3-D renderings, building software tools for editing photos and automatically identifying where a photo was taken.