In Memoriam: Bela Julesz (Lab Founder)
Bela Julesz passed away suddenly on December 31st, 2003.
Bela Julesz, State of New Jersey Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, and Director of the Laboratory of Vision Research,Rutgers University
Diploma, 1950 (Electrical Engineering), Technical University, Budapest;
Ph.D., 1956, Hungarian Academy of Sciences;
(AT&T) Bell Laboratories, 1956-89.
Dr. Julesz taught and did research in communications systems for several years prior to 1956. Since joining Bell Laboratories, he has devoted himself to visual research, particularly depth perception and pattern recognition. He is the originator of the Random-dot Stereoimage technique and of the method of studying texture discrimination by constraining second-order statistics. He has written extensively in the area of visual and auditory perception, and is author of Foundations of Cyclopean Perception (1971, University of Chicago Press), and a second monograph Dialogues on Perception (1995, Bradford/MIT Press). Dr. Julesz was Head of the Sensory and Perceptual Processes Department from 1964 till 1982, and in 1983 became Head, Visual Perception Research Department.
In January 1989 after 32 years at Bell Laboratories he retired and became a State of New Jersey Professor of Psychology and Director of the newly established Laboratory of Vision Research at Rutgers University. He has been a visiting professor of experimental psychology at M.I.T. and other universities.
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Obituaries
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| Obituary in Spatial Vision, Volume 17, Number 3, 2004, pp. 157-159 |
| Biographical Memoir by Thomas V. Papathomas in the Proceedings of the American Pjhilosophical Society. |
| Obituary by Ralph M. Siegel in Public Library of Science Biology |
In 1983 he received (for five years) the MacArthur Fellow Award for his work in Experimental Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. He was a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology from 1977 to 1979 and in 1987. Fellow, AAAS, OSA, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Corresponding Member of the Goettingen Academy of Sciences and Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In 1982 he was elected Neurosciences Associate of the Neurosciences Institute for nine years. In January 1985 was awarded Dr. H. P. Heineken Prize by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From 1985 through 1993 he was Continuing Visiting Professor at Caltech's Biology Division during the winter semesters. In 1987 he was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. In April 1989 he received the Karl Spencer Lashley Award by the American Philosophical Society and was elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is a member of the advisory board of the Santa Fe Institute.
