About two decades ago, I worked with the University of Louisville College of Engineering and the Office of the Vice President for Research to establish the Computer Vision and Image Processing Laboratory (CVIP Lab – www.cvip.uofl.edu) as a multidisciplinary environment for research, teaching, and training in computational image analysis. Over the years, the CVIP Lab has been home to researchers in engineering, medicine, dentistry, mathematics, and psychology who are interested in imaging. The support of the University of Louisville administration and colleagues at various units literally made the CVIP Lab a place that I miss whenever I am away from it, even for an enjoyable vacation.

At the CVIP Lab we pushed agendas for imaging research, from basics to applications, and in the process established immediate and auxiliary but essential infrastructure. Among the auxiliary infrastructure has been high-speed networking to link the University to what has become known as Internet 2, an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, and to link the main campus (Belknap) to the Health Science Campus (HSC) a few miles away. The auxiliary infrastructure included supercomputers and immersive visualization. The essential hardware included high-end computing and graphics workstations, object scanners, and various laboratory benches for electronic design and testing. The laboratory has been visited by researchers, potential engineering students, faculty candidates in engineering, dentistry and medicine; its research activities have been showcased on national and local media, and the University President (John Shumaker) and the Dean of Engineering (Thomas Hanley) recorded advertisements there as the University pushed to promote biomedical research, and to establish a biomedical engineering department, during 1996–2002. Today the CVIP Lab is well recognized by colleagues elsewhere. Research at the laboratory has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Norton and Jewish Hospitals, and various government and industrial organizations.