Past Profiles of Women in Research Labs

Kathrin Berkner is a senior research scientist at Ricoh Innovations, Inc. in Menlo Park, CA. Her research focused on document image processing for applications used by digital multifunction machines, digital cameras, and mobile phones.

Kathrin's approach has applied multiresolution data representations and analysis to a variety of document processing problems. In 2003 she was awarded Ricoh's internal "Minori" award for outstanding creativity for development of wavelet-based enhancement technology used in Ricoh's multifunction products. More recently her interest has focused on combining image-and text-based representations of document information in order to develop frameworks that enable content- and device-dependent rendering of document information. This research has resulted in document viewing and browsing applications suitable for small-size display devices and mobile phones. In these applications, an image, a part of an image, or a collection of images serve not just as pictures or bits, but as an interface betwee the human and the computer. For the work on Multimedia Thumbnails Kathrin was awarded the Best Paper award at the ICME conference in Toronto in 2006.

Currently Kathrin conducts research in the field of optical-digital image processing, an area of computational imaging that studies systems consisting of optical elements and digitial image processing capabilities in a joined framework.

Besides publications in academic journals and proceedings, Kathrin has more than 20 pending patents in the area of image and document processing. She is also serving on various conference program committees as reviewer and chair.

In addition to the technical challenges in her work for Ricoh, Kathrin especially enjoys the cross-cultural experience of working for a Japanese company out of a satellite location. During trips to the company's offices in the Tokyo area she seeks the opportunity to learn first hand from Japanese colleagues about technical problems, challenges, and futuristic dreams. She takes great joy in forming and maintaining communication channels between colleagues across the Pacific Ocean to work on identifying and solving Ricoh's technical needs as well as practicing her basic Japanese language skills.

Kathrin received her Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Bremen in Germany in 1996. After her graduation she was awarded a Feodor-Lynnen fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation that enabled her to join the wavelet group at Rice University, Houston, TX, headed by Prof. Raymond O. Wells, Prof. Sidney Burrus, and Prof. Richard Baraniuk, as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work focused on the use of non-critically sampled wavelet transforms for image analysis and denoising.

Besides work Kathrin has always tried to balance her life through sport (team handball and soccer), music (violin playing), languages, reading, and traveling. In 2006 she and her husband adopted a brittany puppy and in 2008 welcomed their twin babies into this world. Kathrin enjoys living in this family of five that is currently occupying most of her time outside of work.

Isabel Beichl is a mathematician at NIST, the National Institute of Standards & Technology where she works on problems in computational science as part of an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers at NIST. Located in Gaithersburg Maryland, NIST develops standards for industry and does applied and fundamental scientific research. Isabel's work had been in the design of algorithms for simulation of physical systems and in Monte Carlo algorithms in general. More recently, she has been working on finding metrics to characterize the behavior of large networks, such as the Internet. She designs probabilistic methods to estimate solutions to otherwise intractable problems. She has worked on implementations on ``real'' machines, both sequential and parallel because the scientists that she works with need not only good ideas but running code. In practice, finding applications for existing methods has also meant development of new methods because real problems present many challenges that do not occur for the theoretician. Isabel is also the Editor in Chief of the magazine, Computing in Science and Engineering, a joint publication of the AiP and the IEEE Computer Society.

In every project she has been involved in, mathematics and computer science have made a major contribution. A few years ago she developed a simulation of self-avoiding random surfaces for a physics application where both probability and topology were of crucial importance for a viable solution. This, combined with an unusual application of data structures, enabled an approach that the physicists involved probably would have thought of.

Isabel has been at NIST for 20 years. With a PhD in mathematics from Cornell, she began collaborating with NIST scientists while she was teaching at a small liberal arts college nearby and went to NIST once a week for the intellectual stimulation of research. She obtained a visiting appointment for 1 year while on leave from the college and in 1989 was able to join the staff at NIST as a permanent employee. Prior to teaching she worked in UNIX development at Bell Labs for 2 years.

Outside of work, Isabel is an avid bicyclist and has made self-contained tours every year since 1983. She recently rode across the Alps with her husband. She also has a certificate in fine arts from the Maryland Institute and tries to practice the piano every day.