Yezzi, who holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is one of over 1,200 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2015-2016 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement.

From February 1-June 30, 2016, Yezzi will be hosted within the Department of Chemical, Industrial, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Palermo in Italy. While at the University of Palermo, Yezzi will work on a project entitled “Geometric Partial Differential Equations for 3D Surface Reconstruction.”

Yezzi’s research specializes in using geometric partial differential equations (PDE) to extract shape information from raw signal/image data. Several applications in signal processing and computer vision, suitable for these specialized methods, are being studied at universities in southern Italy. The project would include a tutorial course/seminar series on geometric PDE methods to expose researchers to these alternative algorithms. While this tutorial would remain broad in the range of applications, the initial research focus would be computational 3D surface reconstruction, which could assist restoration efforts for historic, culturally important structures in southern Italy.

A member of the Georgia Tech ECE faculty since 1999, Yezzi directs the Lab of Computational Computer Vision, where he and his students conduct research in image processing, medical image analysis, computer vision, and shape optimization.