Dr. Gopal Pingali is a Research Staff Member in the Pervasive Computing Solutions group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, USA. He received the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India, in 1989, M.S. in 1991 and Ph.D in 1993, both in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was a Member of Technical Staff in the Machine Perception Research group at AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel from 1994 to 1996 and in the Visual Communications Research group at Lucent Bell Labs in Murray Hill from 1996 to 2001, before joining IBM in May 2001. 

Dr. Pingali's current research is in two areas: steerable interfaces and telepresence. In the interface area, he is looking at how projectors, cameras, and other sensors can be integrated to create interactive "Everywhere Displays" that can be moved around an environment. In telepresence, he is exploring how cameras and microphone arrays can be used to create a more compelling teleconferencing experience.

Dr. Pingali has written over 30 research papers in the fields of computer vision, multimedia, computer graphics, microscopy, and robotics. He holds five patents in these areas. Dr. Pingali has been a leader in developing real-time computer vision techniques for human tracking. He developed a real-time camera-based people tracking system in 1994-95 which was used by NCR for customer activity analysis solutions in retail and financial environments. He co-invented and developed LucentVision, the first real-time visual information system for sports broadcasts. LucentVision was used in live tennis broadcasts by 25 television networks in more than 100 countries from  1998 to 2000.  He developed a real-time audio-visual tracking system for teleconferencing and human-computer interfacing applications in 1997-98. From 1996 to 1998, he was member of a multi-disciplinary team that developed a system for interactive auralization of complex environments. Earlier, he developed image modeling and restoration techniques for scanning probe microscopy, and also worked on vision systems for autonomous road-following vehicles.

Dr. Pingali  received the Best Industry Related Paper Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2000. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.