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\F2\CSTANFORD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
\CDEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F0



							July 8, 1974


\CStatement of Dr. John McCarthy



To whom it may concern:

\J	I have known Ruzena Bajcsy since she came to Stanford University
from Czechoslovakia as a graduate student in 1967.  I served as her
student adviser and also as her dissertation adviser, and I have followed
her scientific progress since she moved to the University of Pennsylvania
in 1971.  While she was a graduate student, she worked at the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which is concerned with making computers
behave intelligently.  Our work on this subject, while unclassified, is supported
by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of 
Defense.  The justification for this support has been that increased
American capability in this area will have long term defense applications.

	A major segment of the research in our laboratory has been
computer vision.  Our objective is to give a computer the ability to
find objects against a background and to determine 
the relative position of the parts of the object.  This work has applications
both to manipulating objects and to navigating a vehicle.

	At my suggestion, Mrs. Bajcsy undertook to distinguish regions
by visual texture, because this seems to be one of the ways humans
distinguish road surfaces, grass, trees, bare ground, etc. especially
when color can't be relied upon.  Hers was the \F1first\F0 work on this
problem, and she developed several methods that have been subsequently
pursued by her and by others.

	Since she went to the University of Pennsylvania, she has
started research there in the field of computer vision and has
supervised several students and has developed the basic computer
tools for this work.  As a result of her efforts, the University
of Pennsylvania is one of the five or so centers of computer vision
research in the United States.

	In my opinion, the work in vision and in artificial intelligence
at the University of Pennsylvania depends on her to a substantial
degree, and our country's position in this field would be significantly
weakened by her departure, especially since she has specialized in
certain lines of research that are not being pursued elsewhere.

	In my opinion, the issue of her having been a member of the Communist Party
in Czechoslovakia is a false one.  Party membership has long been a criterion
for access to higher education in the satellite countries.
Already when she came to the United
States, she was an opponent of the repressive policies of her
government, and her opposition was confirmed by the Soviet suppression
of what liberties Czechoslovakia had managed to obtain.  During her
entire stay at Stanford, I have had many discussions with her on
this subject, and I am confident that I understand her state of mind,
which is now one of complete loyalty to the United States.

	To the extent that one takes a competitive view of world
science, it would be particularly foolish to force her to return
to Czechoslovakia where her particular research field is hardly
started.  Most likely they wouldn't let her work at all, because
of her previous refusal to return, but if they did, she would be able
to increase their capability in this area by a large degree.  Furthermore,
I feel that since her decision not to return to Czechoslovakia in 1968, her
work has taken a turn which is particularly desirable to keep in the United States.

 	I can see no advantage to the United States in forcing her
to leave, but I can foresee many disadvantages.  Besides this, it would be immoral
to force her to face the persecution of the oppressive present
government of Czechoslovakia since she has already made substantial
contributions to our capability in the important field of computer pattern recognition.\.

	Some of her more recent papers in the filed of pattern recognition include:

\F1Computer Recognition of Roads from Satellite Pictures\F4,
	IEEE Transactions on Computers. \F0(to appear)

\F1Computer Recognition of Bridges, Islands, Rivers and Lakes as they are seen from the Earth Satellite,\F4
	IEEE Transactions on Computers. \F0(to appear)

\F1Computer Description of Real Outdoor Scenes,\F4
	International Pattern Recognition Conference Proceedings, Denmark, August, 1974.

\F1Computer Graphics and Image Recognition,\F0
	Computer Identification of Visual Surfaces Issue,\F4
	Computer Image and Graphics Processing, 1973.

\F1An Image Filtering Context-Dependent Process,\F0
	Special Issue on Digital Filtering and Image Processing of\F4
	IEEE Transactions on Computers. \F0(to appear)

\J	I believe both the quantity and quality of these articles to be further
testimony to her important position in the advancement of work in this area, as 
well as her contribution to scientific advancement of the United States.\.


							Sincerely yours,



							John McCarthy
							Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
							Professor of Computer Science