Biography
Ružena Bajcsy was born on 28 May 1933 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family. She was the daughter of Felix Kučer, a civil engineer, and Margarita Weissová, a teacher, who died tragically when Ružena was three years old. In 1938 her father remarried in 1938 to the paediatrician Klára Halmi, also of Jewish descent. Marie was born of this second marriage, and they moved to Lučenec and later to Zvolen. The family converted to Catholicism. However, the Nazis did not respect Jewish converts, and in the autumn of 1944, they searched the Kučer family's home, took the adults and did not find the girls, who were hidden in a room.
Ružena, aged eleven, and Marie, aged four, waited at home for a week for their parents to return. The girls then went to the Red Cross, which took them into an orphanage. In March 1945, with the arrival of Soviet troops, Marie was reclaimed by her mother's sister, who had survived the war in Budapest.
Ružena remained in the orphanage until 1947, when she moved to a Catholic orphanage in Bratislava, from where she attended classes, first at school and then at high school, where she excelled in mathematics and natural sciences. At the age of 21, Ružena left the orphanage to marry her teacher Július Bajcsy.
At the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava she chose engineering, although she was more interested in mathematics, which would give her access to teaching if she signed an ideological commitment demanded by the communist authorities, which she was not willing to do.
In 1957, she graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Bratislava. In 1967 she obtained her doctorate at the same university and field of study and was the first woman in Slovakia to earn a doctorate in this field.
In 1962 the Slovak University of Technology bought one of the first Russian computers, the Ural II, and needed engineers to maintain it. Ružena Bajcsy applied and was accepted at the University's Data Processing Centre, which enabled her to undertake her doctoral studies, defending her thesis in 1967, becoming the first woman to earn a PhD in Electrical Engineering in Slovakia.
After this, she was invited to study computer science at Stanford University (USA), which at the time was a new and expanding discipline. Here, in 1972, she obtained a second PhD in computer science, with a thesis on computer image analysis.
From 1972 to 2001, she was a professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the only woman in her department, where, in 1978, she established the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. As director of the GRASP lab, she fostered interdisciplinary research activities and attracted faculty from electrical and mechanical engineering, as well as psychology, cognitive science and, of course, computer science. She was director of GRASP from 1985 to 1990.
Throughout his 28 years at the University of Pennsylvania he worked on robotics research, including machine vision (computer vision), tactile perception and, in general, the problem of system identification. He also worked in medical imaging and developed with his students a digital anatomy atlas, together with elastic matching algorithms, which made it possible to automatically identify anatomical structures of the brain, first in X-ray tomography, then with MRI and positron tomography imaging. The use of this technology is now commonplace in medical practice.
In 2002 she joined UC Berkeley as a professor and to help start up the CITRIS Institute (Centre for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). She is currently Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Her current research focuses on the use of robotic technology to non-invasively measure and extract kinematic and dynamic parameters from an individual in order to assess their physical movement capabilities or limitations. If there are limitations, his students design assistive devices that can compensate for the lack of kinematic agility and/or physical strength.
Throughout her career she has written countless scientific articles, aimed at robotics and computing applied to medicine and computational biology. Her development of an algorithm to identify brain structures with both X-ray tomography and resonance, common techniques today in medical practice, are especially relevant.
Throughout these years she has become a US citizen and, since 1995, she has been a member of the National Academy of Medicine; since 1997 from the National Academy of Engineering, as well as from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), all of them in the USA. She has received numerous awards throughout her extensive career, among which the Medal Benjamin Franklin stands out in Computing and Cognitive Sciences (2009). Furthermore, she has been included among the 50 most important women in Science (2002).
Ružena Bajcsy lives and works in California. She is still actively lecturing and has become a legend in her field of expertise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, her children moved to the United States and she lives a family life with her husband, children and grandchildren.
obtained from: https://forohistorico.coit.es/index.php/personajes/personajes-internacionales/item/bajcsy-ruzena (21/07/2023) y https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ru%C5%BEena_Bajcsy