PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — James Hays, the Manning Assistant Professor of Computer Science, is one of 126 U.S. and Canadian researchers to receive a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for 2015, the foundation announced on Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. The fellowships are awarded annually to early career scientists and scholars identified as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.

Hays was honored for his work in computer graphics, computer vision, and computational photography. He uses “Internet scale” data collection and crowd sourcing to improve the way computers can recognize, process and manipulate images. His recent work includes a program that can recognize rough sketches drawn in real time, and an algorithm enabling users to easily modify high-level attributes of photos, such as weather, season, or time of day.

“Receiving the Sloan Fellowship is a huge honor,” Hays said. “It supports the research that my students and I pursue to help computers and people interact with image data. We want images to be as easy to edit as text and just as useful as text for anyone in the world.”

Hays joins several other Sloan fellows currently on the Brown computer science faculty, including Paul Valiant, Ben Raphael, Chad Jenkins, and Amy Greenwald.