Current - The MySoundscape Era

After leaving Bell Labs, I chose to combine my knowledge of digital signal processing, concern for the environment, and belief that education is the great equalizer to increase my STEM work in the area of bioacoustics. I created a program called MySoundscape that includes activities and lessons to educate students about how sound can help measure the health of the environment and lead to its improvement. 

Previous - The Bell Labs Era

I entered Bell Labs after graduate school with the intention to stay until I got bored. I never got bored. My most recent work was in the pursuit of efficient AI. This was with the belief that, besides taking over the world and destroying democratic process, the gluttonous appetite for energy was one of AI's great downsides. Working with colleagues as Stony Brook University, we developed methods to reduce the size and energy use of neural network models and applied this to mobile devices such as robots, drones, and IoT devices. We won an Innovate 100 Award and got neural devices using less energy. Check out the published paper below [1].

Previous to the efficient AI work, I worked on many things. One was a method to reduce interaction between humans and robots [2]. Another was applying gait recognition for elders to recognize not after they've fallen, but to prevent it before they did [3]. I worked with several artists to provide motion detection technology that they incorporated in their art. Omnia Per Omnia is a beautiful example done by Sougwen Chung. I also worked with game developers at NYU and Stevens Institute of Technology. The game, Pixelpalooza, created with NYU, played at the Liberty Science center for three years in the 20-teens.

In 1997, I co-founded the fingerprint company, Veridicom, with some of the technology I and others had created at Bell Labs. Here are a couple of my biometric papers, [4,5] (the former proposing "The Paradox of Secure Biometrics", and the latter I believe to be the first matched fingerprint filter). We had a few firsts in the world of document signal processing. I believe The RightPages Library was one of the first digital libraries [6]. I realized that digital copyrighted documents needed some digital protection, so we pioneered the first methods for document watermarking [7]. I also created a popular method for document layout analysis, perhaps because of its cool name, the docstrum [8].

Numbers:

• >80 peer-reviewed papers; 9 book chapters; 2 books [9,10]; and 4 biometric standards.

• >40 patents

• 4 Fellow awards: Bell Labs Fellow, IEEE Fellow, IAPR Fellow (Int. Assoc. Pattern Recognition), AAIS Fellow (Int. Academy of Artifiial Intelligence Scientists)

• 2 university adjunct teaching positions: New York University, Cooper Union.

• 6 editorial boards, the most recent being Pattern Recognition; many conference committees

• 6 government committees: NIST, NSF, NIJ, and NAE, NJ Commission on Science and Technology, and France's INRIA

• 3 electrical engineering degrees: BASc, U. Ottawa; MSEE, U. Washington, Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University

Selected Publications

1. B.B Cao, L. O'Gorman, M.Coss, S. Jain, "Few-class arena: A benchmark for efficient selection of vision models and dataset difficulty measurement", Int. Conf. on Learning Representations, 2025.

2. L. O'Gorman, "Efficient multi-band temporal video filter for reducing human-robot interaction", Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition, 2024.

3. L. O'Gorman, X. Liu, M.I. Sarker, M. Milanova, "Video analytics gait trend measurement for fall prevention and health monitoring", Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition, 2021.

4. L. O'Gorman, "Comparing passwords, tokens, and biometrics for user authentication", Proceedings of the IEEE, 2004.

5. L. O'Gorman, J.V. Nickerson, "An approach to fingerprint filter design", Pattern Recognition, 1989.

6. M. M. Hoffman, L. O'Gorman, G. A. Story, J. Q. Arnold, N. H. Macdonald, "The RightPages Service: An image-based electronic library", Journalof the American Society for Information Science, 1993.

7. J.T. Brassil, S. Low, N.F. Maxemchuk, L. O'Gorman, "Electronic marking and identification techniques to discourage document copying", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 1995.

8. L. O'Gorman, "The document spectrum for page layout analysis", IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1993.

9. L. O'Gorman, M. Seul, M.J. Sammon, Practical Algorithms for Image Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

10. L. O'Gorman, R. Kasturi, Document Image Analysis, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.