Takeo Kanade Papers

The Kanade papers were originally processed in the early 2000s, in conjunction with a project to digitize materials from the collection and make them available online. An inventory and minimal finding aid was available for the first twelve boxes of material. At the beginning of reprocessing in 2023, there were 49 boxes of material. Because most of the original context of these folders and papers has been lost, where it is possible the original folder labels have been maintained. Some materials were unfoldered, unlabeled, or poorly described and adjustments have been made in these circumstances.

In some cases, multiple folders existed for the same or complementary material; where it made sense to do so, these have been combined.

The collection includes a variety of materials covering the course of Dr. Kanade's career. The first seven series focuses on specific projects in Kanade's work, including Autonomous Robots, the Direct Drive Arm, and various projects dealing with Image Understanding. Another series focuses on Kanade's prolific publication work and also includes his collection of relevant reference publications, which cover a variety of topics. The next series focuses on his work at CMU, including documents on the Vision and Autonomous Systems Center (VASC) and the Video Surveillance and Monitoring (VSAM) project, as well as materials from his time as director of The Robotics Institute. Another series covers the different collaborators and partnerships he worked with outside of the university. This includes meeting minutes for advisory boards, presentations he gave to corporations, and his work with the International Journal of Computer Vision. The next series focuses on materials, presentations, and planning notes from different conferences, meetings, and workshops that Kanade either attended, chaired, or planned during his career. The final few series includes miscellaneous correspondence, sorted by year; subject files, which cover topics such as medical robotics, Japanese robotics companies, and other universities and their work in the field; and a small amount of personal materials, such as legal agreements. The last group includes copies of video tapes from the collection, mostly recordings from research projects.

A significant portion of the collection is in Japanese; where possible for the purpose of sorting the materials, translations were done via Google Translate. Materials in Japanese have been noted as such.