Dr. Charles Cohen has been a technical lead and program manager in the fields of modeling and simulation, image processing, robotics, human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence for more than a decade. At Cybernet, he has been the project manager for many projects for the United States Armed Forces (Air Force, Navy, and Army), National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Homeland Security and other government agencies. His projects include work on simulation, training, real-time optical pose determination, robotics, virtual reality, object identification, feature and body tracking and human performance evaluation.

Dr. Cohen’s main area of interest is gesture and behavior recognition recognition device control, communication, and surveillance. For his Ph.D. thesis, and continued in R&D work for NASA, the U.S. Army, DARPA, and the U.S. Air Force, he created a system for the generation and recognition of dynamic and static gestures. The dynamic gestures were inspired by representative gestures from human-to-human control applications. He has expanded this system to recognize 3D gestures from a variety of sensor data, and has classified the combination of gestures as motion behaviors for use in surveillance and security applications.

Dr. Cohen runs Cybernet’s Modeling, Simulation, and Training group. He is responsible for the management of a general-purpose, open-standard simulation architecture called OpenSkies. He also contributed to the design of this product as well as the design of flight dynamics, collision, and force-feedback algorithms, and acts as a key designer for many of the OpenSkies subsystems including the terrain parsing/rendering/LOD system, scenegraph, weather model, and parallel thread/timer system. Working with the University of Michigan Medical School, he also led the team that developed a variety of force-feedback based medical training simulation environments.