I am currently a graduate student with the Computer Science department at Colorado State University. My broad interests are in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. Somewhat more specifically, I am interested in the bridge between lower-level visual perception and the higher-level symbolic abstractions that we use to reason about what we see. My advisor, Dr. Bruce Draper, is an expert in biomimetic computer vision, and so we take our cues from studying the functional anatomy of the primate visual system.

I have recently earned my Master's diploma from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, with Dr. Qiuming Zhu as my advisor. My thesis topic is called VERSA, Video Event Recognition for Surveillance Applications. This web site is dedicated in large part to describing that technology.

I am also interested in robotics, especially as relates to autonomous mobile platforms. I have some experience with a number of hobbyist/educational platforms such as Parallax BOE-bot, Lego Mindstorms NXT, and iRobot Roomba. The Roomba will be employed to clean carpets (otherwise my wife would never approve), but I plan to hack it a bit...sssh...don't tell!

While pursuing my Ph.D., I am also working part-time for 21st Century Systems, Inc., (http://www.21csi.com), in the position of research scientist. I have authored several winning SBIR Phase I and Phase II funded by various Department of Defense research agencies. At 21CSI, I was the originator of the VisionAgent® video analytics framework and a key contributor to various agent-based distributed reasoning mechanisms.

My wife's name is Jodi. She's super cool. She likes to hike mountains. I do too, but I have a hard time keeping up with her. Since moving to Colorado in August 2007, we've climbed several peaks in the area. I have reached the summit of 8 14'ers, and Jodi has 22+ under her belt (and counting!). We have a public web album with photos from our hiking adventures. Check it out at: Steve and Jodi's Web Album.

I am also a nidan (2nd degree) in the martial art of Aikido. I study Aikido under Sensei Ron Christenham of Sarpy Aikido. We are Aikikai affiliated through Robert Kubo Shihan's Aikido Hawaii International (AHI) organization.

You can contact me via e-mail at svohara (at) ieee (dot) org.
My LinkedIn profile is here.