title: Being There

text: Though he has now risen to the pinnacle of Washington society, the Secret Service and some 16 other agencies are unable to find any background information on him. During this time Rand's personal physician, Dr. Allenby, becomes increasingly suspicious that Chance is not a wise political expert and that the mystery of his identity may have a more mundane explanation. Dr. Allenby considers telling Rand this, but remains silent when he realizes how happy Chance is making him in his final days.


title: Being There

text: The dying Rand encourages Eve to become close to "Chauncey". She is already attracted to him and makes a sexual advance. Chance has no interest in or knowledge of sex, but mimics a kissing scene from the 1968 film "The Thomas Crown Affair", which happens to be showing on the TV. When the scene ends, Chauncey stops suddenly and Eve is confused. She asks what he likes, meaning sexually; he replies "I like to watch," meaning television. She is momentarily taken aback, but decides she is willing to masturbate for his voyeuristic pleasure, thereby not noticing that he has turned back to the TV and is now imitating a yoga exercise on a different channel.


title: Being There

text: Chance is present at Rand's death and shows genuine sadness at his passing. Questioned by Dr. Allenby, he admits that he "loves Eve very much" and also that he is just a gardener. When he leaves to inform Eve of Ben's death, Allenby says to himself, "I understand," but interpretation of that is left to the viewer.


title: Being There

text: While the President delivers a speech at Rand's funeral, the pallbearers hold a whispered discussion over potential replacements for the President in the next term of office and unanimously agree on Chauncey Gardiner as successor. Oblivious to all this, Chance wanders off through Rand's wintry estate. He straightens out a pine sapling flattened by a fallen branch, then walks across the surface of a lake. He pauses, dips his umbrella deep into the water under his feet, then continues on, while the President is heard quoting Rand: "Life is a state of mind."


title: Being There

text: Principal filming occurred at the Biltmore Estate, the largest private home in America, located in Asheville, North Carolina.


title: Being There

text: Melvyn Douglas's granddaughter, Illeana Douglas, visited the set and met Peter Sellers, who is her favorite actor. She has since credited the film for inspiring her to pursue a career in acting. According to Illeana, Sellers and Douglas had known each other since the 1940s, when they first met in Burma during World War II. They often reminisced about their war days while on the set.


title: Being There

text: Burt Lancaster was Ashby's first choice for the role of Ben Rand. Laurence Olivier was also considered for the role, but he turned it down because of the masturbation scene.


title: Being There

text: According to MacLaine, "(Peter) believed he was Chauncey. He never had lunch with me... He was Chauncey Gardiner the whole shoot, but believing he was having a love affair with me."


title: Being There

text: The making of the film is portrayed in "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", a biographical film of Sellers' life.


title: Being There

text: Incidental music is used very sparingly. What little original music is used was composed by Johnny Mandel, and primarily features two recurrent piano themes based on "Gnossiennes" No. 4 and No. 5 by Erik Satie. The other major pieces of music used are the Eumir Deodato jazz/funk arrangement of the opening fanfare from "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "Basketball Jones" by Cheech and Chong. These pieces respectively accompany the title credits and Chance's first arrival to the Biltmore Estate.


title: Being There

text: Mandel was also assisted by his cousin and fellow composer Miles Goodman with the orchestration of the film.


title: Being There

text: The film opened to positive reviews and gave Sellers a hit after many of his previous films outside of the "Pink Panther" series had flopped. Film critic Roger Ebert awarded a full grade of 4 out of 4 stars in his original print review. Gene Siskel also gave the film a perfect grade of 4 stars, calling it "one of those rare films, a work of such electric comedy that you are more likely to watch it in amazement than to break down and laugh." Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" called the film "a stately, beautifully acted satire with a premise that's funny but fragile."


title: Being There

text: Vincent Misiano reviewed "Being There" in "Ares Magazine" #3 and commented that "The film's humor never flags and yet its delicately bitter irony is never far away. It satirizes politics and politicians, business and businessmen, and, finally, all the rest of us and what we imagine we see when we look at one another." In his 2005 book "The Great Movies II", Roger Ebert mentioned the reaction of his students to the final scene (which is unique to the film, not appearing in the book), stating that they once suggested that Chance may be walking on a submerged pier. But, Ebert writes "The movie presents us with an image, and while you may discuss the meaning of the image, it is not permitted to devise explanations for it. Since Ashby does not show a pier, there is no pier — a movie is exactly what it shows us, and nothing more."


title: Being There

text: The credits at the film's end roll over an outtake, known as the "Rafael outtake." Sellers was later displeased that the outtake ran because he believed it took away from Chauncey's mystique. He also believed the outtake was what prevented him from winning the Oscar.


title: Being There

text: The film holds a score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 8.56/10. The critical consensus reads: "Smart, sophisticated, and refreshingly subtle, "Being There" soars behind sensitive direction from Hal Ashby and a stellar Peter Sellers performance." In 2003 "The New York Times" placed the film on its "Best 1000 Movies Ever" list.


title: Being There

text: A 30th Anniversary Edition was released on DVD and Blu-ray in February 2009. The Criterion Collection issued the film on DVD and Blu-ray in March 2017.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music score as well as lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences). Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era. It was produced by Warner Bros. with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and features six songs performed by Al Jolson. Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson, the plot was adapted from his short story "The Day of Atonement".


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden, he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer, performing in blackface. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Darryl F. Zanuck won an Academy Honorary Award for producing the film; Alfred A. Cohn was nominated for Best Writing (Adaptation) at the 1st Academy Awards. In 1996, "The Jazz Singer" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". In 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Cantor Rabinowitz wants his son to carry on the generations-old family tradition and become a cantor at the synagogue in the Jewish ghetto of Manhattan's Lower East Side. But, thirteen-year-old Jakie Rabinowitz is performing so-called jazz tunes at the beer garden. Moisha Yudelson spots the boy and tells Jakie's father, who drags him home. Jakie clings to his mother, Sara, as his father declares, "I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him!" Jakie threatens: "If you whip me again, I'll run away—and "never come back!"" After the whipping, Jakie kisses his mother goodbye and, true to his word, runs away. At the Yom Kippur service, Rabinowitz mournfully tells a fellow celebrant, "My son was to stand at my side and sing tonight—but now I have no son." As the sacred Kol Nidre is sung, Jakie sneaks back home to retrieve a picture of his loving mother.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: About ten years later, Jakie has changed his name to the more assimilated Jack Robin. Jack is called up from his table at a cabaret to perform on stage ("Dirty Hands, Dirty Face").


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Jack wows the crowd with his energized rendition. Afterward, he is introduced to the beautiful Mary Dale, a musical theater dancer. "There are lots of jazz singers, but "you" have a tear in your voice," she says, offering to help with his budding career. With her help, Jack eventually gets his big break: a leading part in the new musical "April Follies".


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Back at the family home Jack left long ago, the elder Rabinowitz instructs a young student in the traditional cantorial art. Jack appears and tries to explain his point of view, and his love of modern music, but the appalled cantor banishes him: "I never want to see you again—you "jazz singer!"" As he leaves, Jack makes a prediction: "I came home with a heart full of love, but you don't want to understand. Some day you'll understand, the same as Mama does."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Two weeks after Jack's expulsion from the family home and 24 hours before the opening night of "April Follies" on Broadway, Jack's father falls gravely ill. Jack is asked to choose between the show and duty to his family and faith: in order to sing the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur in his father's place, he will have to miss the big premiere.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: That evening, the eve of Yom Kippur, Yudelson tells the Jewish elders, "For the first time, we have no Cantor on the Day of Atonement." Lying in his bed, weak and gaunt, Cantor Rabinowitz tells Sara that he cannot perform on the most sacred of holy days: "My son came to me in my dreams—he sang Kol Nidre so beautifully. If he would only sing like that tonight—surely he would be forgiven."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: As Jack prepares for a dress rehearsal by applying blackface makeup, he and Mary discuss his career aspirations and the family pressures they agree he must resist. Sara and Yudelson come to Jack's dressing room to plead for him to come to his father and sing in his stead. Jack is torn. He delivers his blackface performance ("Mother of Mine, I Still Have You"), and Sara sees her son on stage for the first time. She has a tearful revelation: "Here he belongs. If God wanted him in His house, He would have kept him there. He's not "my" boy anymore—he belongs to the whole world now."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Afterward, Jack returns to the Rabinowitz home. He kneels at his father's bedside and the two converse fondly: "My son—I love you." Sara suggests that it may help heal his father if Jack takes his place at the Yom Kippur service. Mary arrives with the producer, who warns Jack that he'll never work on Broadway again if he fails to appear on opening night. Jack can't decide. Mary challenges him: "Were you lying when you said your career came before "everything?"" Jack is unsure if he even can replace his father: "I haven't sung Kol Nidre since I was a little boy." His mother tells him, "Do what is in your heart, Jakie—if you sing and God is not in your voice—your father will know." The producer cajoles Jack: "You're a "jazz singer" at heart!"


title: The Jazz Singer

text: At the theater, the opening night audience is told that there will be no performance. Jack sings the Kol Nidre in his father's place. His father listens from his deathbed to the nearby ceremony and speaks his last, forgiving words: "Mama, we have our son again." The spirit of Jack's father is shown at his side in the synagogue. Mary has come to listen. She sees how Jack has reconciled the division in his soul: "a jazz singer—singing to his God."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: "The season passes—and time heals—the show goes on." Jack, as "The Jazz Singer," is now appearing at the Winter Garden theater, apparently as the featured performer opening for a show called "Back Room". In the front row of the packed theater, his mother sits alongside Yudelson. Jack, in blackface, performs the song "My Mammy" for her and the world.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: On April 25, 1917, Samson Raphaelson, a native of New York City's Lower East Side and a University of Illinois undergraduate, attended a performance of the musical "Robinson Crusoe, Jr." in Champaign, Illinois. The star of the show was a thirty-year-old singer, Al Jolson, a Lithuanian-born Jew who performed in blackface. In a 1927 interview, Raphaelson described the experience: "I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson—his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his audience to a tremendous absorption in his song." He explained that he had seen emotional intensity like Jolson's only among synagogue cantors.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: A few years later, pursuing a professional literary career, Raphaelson wrote "The Day of Atonement", a short story about a young Jew named Jakie Rabinowitz, based on Jolson's real life. The story was published in January 1922 in "Everybody's Magazine". Raphaelson later adapted the story into a stage play, "The Jazz Singer". A straight drama, all the singing in Raphaelson's version takes place offstage. With George Jessel in the lead role, the show premiered at the Warner Theatre in Times Square on September 1925 and became a hit. Warner Bros. acquired the movie rights to the play on June 4, 1926, and signed Jessel to a contract. "The Moving Picture World" published a story in February 1927 announcing that production on the film would begin with Jessel on May 1.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: But the plans to make the film with Jessel would fall through, for multiple reasons. Jessel's contract with Warner Bros. had not anticipated that the movie they had particularly signed him for would be made with sound (he'd made a modestly budgeted, silent comedy in the interim). When Warner had hits with two Vitaphone, though dialogue-less, features in late 1926, "The Jazz Singer" production had been reconceived. Jessel asked for a bonus or a new contract, but was rebuffed. According to Jessel's description in his autobiography, Harry Warner "was having a tough time with the financing of the company... He talked about taking care of me if the picture was a success. I did not feel that was enough." In fact, around the beginning of 1927, Harry Warner—the eldest of the brothers who ran the eponymous studio—had sold $4 million of his personal stock to keep the studio solvent. Then came another major issue. According to Jessel, a first read of screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn's adaptation "threw me into a fit. Instead of the boy's leaving the theatre and following the traditions of his father by singing in the synagogue, as in the play, the picture scenario had him return to the Winter Garden as a blackface comedian, with his mother wildly applauding in the box. I raised hell. Money or no money, I would not do this."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: According to performer Eddie Cantor, as negotiations between Warner Bros. and Jessel floundered, Jack L. Warner and the studio's production chief, Darryl Zanuck, called to see if he was interested in the part. Cantor, a friend of Jessel's, responded that he was sure any differences with the actor could be worked out and offered his assistance. Cantor was not invited to participate in the Jessel talks; instead, the role was then offered to Jolson, who had inspired it in the first place. Describing Jolson as the production's best choice for its star, film historian Donald Crafton wrote, "The entertainer, who sang jazzed-up minstrel numbers in blackface, was at the height of his phenomenal popularity. Anticipating the later stardom of crooners and rock stars, Jolson electrified audiences with the vitality and sex appeal of his songs and gestures, which owed much to black american sources." As described by film historian Robert L. Carringer, "Jessel was a vaudeville comedian and master of ceremonies with one successful play and one modestly successful film to his credit. Jolson was a superstar." Jolson took the part, signing a $75,000 contract on May 26, 1927, for eight weeks of services beginning in July. There have been several claims but no proof that Jolson invested some of his own money in the film. Jessel and Jolson, also friends, did not speak for some time after—on the one hand, Jessel had been confiding his problems with the Warners to Jolson; on the other, Jolson had signed with them without telling Jessel of his plans. In his autobiography, Jessel wrote that, in the end, Jolson "must not be blamed, as the Warners had definitely decided that I was out."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: While many earlier sound films had dialogue, all were short subjects. D. W. Griffith's feature "Dream Street" (1921) was shown in New York with a single singing sequence and crowd noises, using the sound-on-disc system Photokinema. The film was preceded by a program of sound shorts, including a sequence with Griffith speaking directly to the audience, but the feature itself had no talking scenes. On April 15, 1923, Lee De Forest introduced the sound-on-film system Phonofilm, which had synchronized sound and dialogue, but the sound quality was poor, and the films produced in this process were short films only.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The first Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, "Don Juan" (premiered August 1926) and "The Better 'Ole" (premiered October 1926), like three more that followed in early 1927 ("When a Man Loves", "Old San Francisco", and "The First Auto"), had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. "The Jazz Singer" contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech: Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer; his father, a cantor, performs the devotional Kol Nidre; the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, appearing as himself, sings an excerpt of another religious melody, Kaddish, and the song "Yahrzeit Licht". As the adult Jack Robin, Jolson performs six songs: five popular "jazz" tunes and the Kol Nidre. The sound for the film was recorded by British-born George Groves, who had also worked on "Don Juan". To direct, the studio chose Alan Crosland, who already had two Vitaphone films to his credit: "Don Juan" and "Old San Francisco", which opened while "The Jazz Singer" was in production.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Jolson's first vocal performance, about fifteen minutes into the picture, is of "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", with music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke. The first synchronized speech, uttered by Jack to a cabaret crowd and to the piano player in the band that accompanies him, occurs directly after that performance, beginning at the 17:25 mark of the film. Jack's first spoken words—"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"—were well-established stage patter of Jolson's. He had even spoken very similar lines in an earlier short, "Al Jolson in "A Plantation Act."" (1926) The line had become virtually an in-joke. In November 1918, during a gala concert celebrating the end of World War I, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for the preceding performer, the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, and exclaimed, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The following year, he recorded the song "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". In a later scene, Jack talks with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, in the family parlor; his father enters and pronounces one very conclusive word, "Stop!"


title: The Jazz Singer

text: In total, the movie contains barely two minutes' worth of synchronized talking, much or all of it improvised. The rest of the dialogue is presented through the caption cards, or intertitles, standard in silent movies of the era; as was common, those titles were composed not by the film's scenarist, Alfred Cohn, but by another writer – in this case, Jack Jarmuth.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: While Jolson was touring with a stage show during June 1927, production on "The Jazz Singer" began with the shooting of exterior scenes by the second unit. In late June, Alan Crosland headed to New York City to shoot the Lower East Side and Winter Garden exteriors on location. Jolson joined the production in mid-July (his contract specified July 11). Filming with Jolson began with his silent scenes; the more complex Vitaphone sequences were primarily done in late August. Both Jolson and Zanuck would later take credit for thinking up the ad-libbed dialogue sequence between Jack and his mother; another story had it that Sam Warner was impressed by Jolson's brief ad-libbing in the cabaret scene and had Cohn come up with some lines on the spot. On September 23, "Motion Picture News" reported that production on the film had been completed.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The production cost for "The Jazz Singer" was $422,000 (approximately US$ in dollars), a large sum, especially for Warner Bros., which rarely spent more than $250,000. It was by no means a record for the studio, however; two features starring John Barrymore had been costlier: "The Sea Beast" (1926), a loose and entirely silent adaptation of "Moby-Dick", at $503,000 and "Don Juan" at $546,000. Nonetheless, the outlay constituted a major gamble in light of the studio's financial straits: while "The Jazz Singer" was in production, Harry Warner stopped taking a salary, pawned jewelry belonging to his wife, and moved his family into a smaller apartment.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The premiere occurred on October 6, 1927, at Warner Bros.' flagship theater in New York City. In keeping with the film's theme of a conflict within a Jewish family, the film premiered after sunset on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday. The buildup to the premiere was tense. Besides Warner Bros.' precarious financial position, the physical presentation of the film itself was remarkably complex:Each of Jolson's musical numbers was mounted on a separate reel with a separate accompanying sound disc. Even though the film was only eighty-nine minutes long...there were fifteen reels and fifteen discs to manage, and the projectionist had to be able to thread the film and cue up the Vitaphone records very quickly. The least stumble, hesitation, or human error would result in public and financial humiliation for the company. None of the four Warner brothers were able to attend: Sam Warner—among them, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone—had died the previous day of pneumonia, and the surviving brothers had returned to California for his funeral.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: According to Doris Warner, who was in attendance, about halfway through the film she began to feel that something exceptional was taking place. Suddenly, Jolson's face appeared in big close-up, and said "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet!" Jolson's "Wait a minute" line prompted a loud, positive response from the audience, who were dumbfounded by seeing and hearing someone speak on a film for the first time, so much so that the double-entendre was missed at first. Applause followed each of his songs. Excitement built, and when Jolson and Eugenie Besserer began their dialogue scene, "the audience became hysterical." After the show, the audience turned into a "milling, battling, mob", in one journalist's description, chanting "Jolson, Jolson, Jolson!" Among those who reviewed the film, the critic who foresaw most clearly what it presaged for the future of cinema was "Life" magazine's Robert E. Sherwood. He described the spoken dialogue scene between Jolson and Besserer as "fraught with tremendous significance... I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight".


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Critical reaction was generally, though far from universally, positive. "The New York Times" critic Mordaunt Hall, reviewing the film's premiere, declared that


title: The Jazz Singer

text: not since the first presentation of Vitaphone features, more than a year ago [i.e., "Don Juan"], has anything like the ovation been heard in a motion-picture theatre... The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogue have been introduced most adroitly. This in itself is an ambitious move, for in the expression of song the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously. The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: "Variety" called it "[u]ndoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen...[with] abundant power and appeal." Richard Watts Jr. of the "New York Herald Tribune" called it a "pleasantly sentimental orgy dealing with a struggle between religion and art... [T]his is not essentially a motion picture, but rather a chance to capture for comparative immortality the sight and sound of a great performer." The "Exhibitors Herald"s take was virtually identical: "scarcely a motion picture. It should be more properly labeled an enlarged Vitaphone record of Al Jolson in half a dozen songs." The film received favorable reviews in both the Jewish press and in African American newspapers such as the Baltimore "Afro-American", the "New York Amsterdam News", and the "Pittsburgh Courier". The headline of the "Los Angeles Times" review told a somewhat different story: "'Jazz Singer' Scores a Hit—Vitaphone and Al Jolson Responsible, Picture Itself Second Rate." "Photoplay" dismissed Jolson as "no movie actor. Without his Broadway reputation he wouldn't rate as a minor player."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The film developed into a major hit, demonstrating the profit potential of feature-length "talkies", but Donald Crafton has shown that the reputation the film later acquired for being one of Hollywood's most enormous successes to date was inflated. The movie did well, but not astonishingly so, in the major cities where it was first released, garnering much of its impressive profits with long, steady runs in population centers large and small all around the country. As conversion of movie theaters to sound was still in its early stages, the film actually arrived at many of those secondary venues in a silent version. On the other hand, Crafton's statement that "The Jazz Singer" "was in a distinct second or third tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even other Vitaphone talkies" is also incorrect. In fact, the film was easily the biggest earner in Warner Bros. history, and would remain so until it was surpassed a year later by "The Singing Fool", another Jolson feature. In the larger scope of Hollywood, among films originally released in 1927, available evidence suggests that "The Jazz Singer" was among the three biggest box office hits, trailing only "Wings" and, perhaps, "The King of Kings". According to Warner Bros records the film earned revenues of $1,974,000 in the United States and Canada, and $651,000 elsewhere, for a worldwide theatrical gross rental of approximately $2.6 million (the studio's share of the box office gross) and a profit of $1,196,750.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: One of the keys to the film's success was an innovative marketing scheme conceived by Sam Morris, Warner Bros.' sales manager. In Crafton's description:


title: The Jazz Singer

text: [A] special clause in Warners' Vitaphone exhibition contract virtually guaranteed long runs. Theaters had to book "The Jazz Singer" for full rather than split weeks. Instead of the traditional flat rental fee, Warners took a percentage of the gate. A sliding scale meant that the exhibitor's take increased the longer the film was held over. The signing of this contract by the greater New York Fox Theatres circuit was regarded as a headline-making precedent.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Similar arrangements, based on a percentage of the gross rather than flat rental fees, would soon become standard for the U.S. film industry's high-end or "A" product.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Though in retrospect it is understood that the success of "The Jazz Singer" signaled the end of the silent motion-picture era, this was not immediately apparent. Mordaunt Hall, for example, praised Warner Bros. for "astutely realiz[ing] that a film conception of "The Jazz Singer" was one of the few subjects that would lend itself to the use of the Vitaphone." In historian Richard Koszarski's words, "Silent films did not disappear overnight, nor did talking films immediately flood the theaters... Nevertheless, 1927 remains the year that Warner Bros. moved to close the book on the history of silent pictures, even if their original goal had been somewhat more modest."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The film had other effects that were more immediate. George Jessel, who was in his third season touring with the stage production of "The Jazz Singer", later described what happened to his show—perhaps anticipating how sound would soon cement Hollywood's dominance of the American entertainment industry: "A week or two after the Washington engagement the sound-and-picture version of "The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson was sweeping the country, and I was swept out of business. I couldn't compete with a picture theatre across the street showing the first great sound picture in the world...for fifty cents, while the price at my theatre was $3.00."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: As the truly pivotal event, Crafton points to the national release of the film's sound version in early 1928—he dates it to January, Block and Wilson to February 4. In March, Warners announced that "The Jazz Singer" was playing at a record 235 theaters (though many could still show it only silently). In May, a consortium including the leading Hollywood studios signed up with Western Electric's licensing division, ERPI, for sound conversion. In July, Warner Bros. released the first all-talking feature, "Lights of New York", a musical crime melodrama. On September 27, "The Jazz Singer" became the first feature-length talking picture to be shown in Europe when it premiered at London's Piccadilly Theatre. The movie "created a sensation", according to British film historian Rachael Low. ""The Jazz Singer" was a turning point [for the introduction of sound]. "The Bioscope" greeted it with, 'We are inclined to wonder why we ever called them Living Pictures.'" The Paris sound premiere followed in January 1929.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Before the 1st Academy Awards ceremony was held in May 1929, honoring films released between August 1927 and July 1928, "The Jazz Singer" was ruled ineligible for the two top prizes—the Outstanding Picture, Production and the Unique and Artistic Production—on the basis that it would have been unfair competition for the silent pictures under consideration. By mid-1929, Hollywood was producing almost exclusively sound films; by the end of the following year, the same was true in much of Western Europe. Jolson went on to make a series of movies for Warners, including "The Singing Fool", a part-talkie, and the all-talking features "Say It with Songs" (1929), "Mammy" (1930), and "Big Boy" (1930).


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Jack Robin's use of blackface in his Broadway stage act—a common practice at the time, which is now widely condemned as racist—is the primary focus of many "Jazz Singer" studies. Its crucial and unusual role is described by scholar Corin Willis:


title: The Jazz Singer

text: In contrast to the racial jokes and innuendo brought out in its subsequent persistence in early sound film, blackface imagery in "The Jazz Singer" is at the core of the film's central theme, an expressive and artistic exploration of the notion of duplicity and ethnic hybridity within American identity. Of the more than seventy examples of blackface in early sound film 1927–53 that I have viewed (including the nine blackface appearances Jolson subsequently made), "The Jazz Singer" is unique in that it is the only film where blackface is central to the narrative development and thematic expression.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The function and meaning of blackface in the film is intimately involved with Jack's own Jewish heritage and his desire to make his mark in mass American culture—much as the ethnically Jewish Jolson and the Warner brothers were doing themselves. Jack Robin "compounds both tradition and stardom. The Warner Brothers thesis is that, really to succeed, a man must first acknowledge his ethnic self," argues W. T. Lhamon. "[T]he whole film builds toward the blacking-up scene at the dress rehearsal. Jack Robin needs the blackface mask as the agency of his compounded identity. Blackface will hold all the identities together without freezing them in a singular relationship or replacing their parts."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Seymour Stark's view is less sanguine. In describing Jolson's extensive experience performing in blackface in stage musicals, he asserts, "The immigrant Jew as Broadway star...works within a blackface minstrel tradition that obscures his Jewish pedigree, but proclaims his white identity. Jolson's slight Yiddish accent was hidden by a Southern veneer." Arguing that "The Jazz Singer" actually avoids honestly dealing with the tension between American assimilation and Jewish identity, he claims that its "covert message...is that the symbol of blackface provides the Jewish immigrant with the same rights and privileges accorded to earlier generations of European immigrants initiated into the rituals of the minstrel show."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Lisa Silberman Brenner contradicts this view. She returns to the intentions expressed by Samson Raphaelson, on whose play the film's script was closely based: "For Raphaelson, jazz is prayer, American style, and the blackface minstrel the new Jewish cantor. Based on the author's own words, the play is about blackface as a means for Jews to express a new kind of Jewishness, that of the modern American Jew." She observes that during the same period, the Jewish press was noting with pride that Jewish performers were adopting aspects of African American music.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: According to Scott Eyman, the film "marks one of the few times Hollywood Jews allowed themselves to contemplate their own central cultural myth, and the conundrums that go with it. "The Jazz Singer" implicitly celebrates the ambition and drive needed to escape the "shtetls" of Europe and the ghettos of New York City, and the attendant hunger for recognition. Jack, Sam, and Harry [Warner] let Jack Robin have it all: the satisfaction of taking his father's place "and" of conquering the Winter Garden. They were, perhaps unwittingly, dramatizing some of their own ambivalence about the debt first-generation Americans owed their parents."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: Three subsequent screen versions of "The Jazz Singer" have been produced: a 1952 remake, starring Danny Thomas and Peggy Lee; a 1959 television remake, starring Jerry Lewis; and a 1980 remake starring Neil Diamond, Lucie Arnaz, and Laurence Olivier. "The Jazz Singer" was adapted as a one-hour radio play on two broadcasts of Lux Radio Theatre, both starring Al Jolson, reprising his screen role. The first aired August 10, 1936; the second, also starring Gail Patrick, on June 2, 1947.


title: The Jazz Singer

text: "The Jazz Singer" was parodied as early as 1936, in the Warner Bros. cartoon "I Love to Singa", directed by Tex Avery. Its hero is "Owl Jolson", a young owl who croons popular ditties, such as the title song, against the wishes of his father, a classical music teacher. Among the many references to "The Jazz Singer" in popular culture, perhaps the most significant is that of the MGM musical "Singin' in the Rain" (1952). The story, set in 1927, revolves around efforts to change a silent film production, "The Dueling Cavalier", into a talking picture in response to "The Jazz Singer"s success. At one point Donald O'Connor's character suggests a new name for the now-musical, "I've got it! 'The Dueling Mammy'." The plot of "The Simpsons" episode "Like Father, Like Clown" (1991) parallels the tale of Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin. Krusty the Clown's rabbi father disapproves of his son's choice to be a comedian, telling him, "You have brought shame on our family! Oh, if you were a musician or a jazz singer, this I could forgive."


title: The Jazz Singer

text: According to film historian Krin Gabbard, "The Jazz Singer" "provides the basic narrative for the lives of jazz and popular musicians in the movies. If this argument means that sometime after 1959 the narrative must belong to pop rockers, it only proves the power of the original 1927 film to determine how Hollywood tells the stories of popular musicians." More broadly, he also suggests that this "seemingly unique film" has "become a paradigm for American success stories." More specifically, he examines a cycle of biopics of white jazz musicians stretching from "Birth of the Blues" (1941) to "The Five Pennies" (1959) that trace their roots to "The Jazz Singer".


title: The Jazz Singer

text: In 1996, "The Jazz Singer" was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" motion pictures. In 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety. In 2007, a three-disc deluxe DVD edition of the film was released. The supplemental material includes Jolson's Vitaphone short, "A Plantation Act" (1926).


title: The Jazz Singer

text: The phrase said by Al Jolson, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" was voted as the 71st best quote by the American Film Institute.


title: Computer vision

text: Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human visual system can do.


title: Computer vision

text: Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g. in the forms of decisions. Understanding in this context means the transformation of visual images (the input of the retina) into descriptions of the world that make sense to thought processes and can elicit appropriate action. This image understanding can be seen as the disentangling of symbolic information from image data using models constructed with the aid of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.


title: Computer vision

text: The scientific discipline of computer vision is concerned with the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as video sequences, views from multiple cameras, multi-dimensional data from a 3D scanner, or medical scanning devices. The technological discipline of computer vision seeks to apply its theories and models to the construction of computer vision systems.


title: Computer vision

text: Sub-domains of computer vision include scene reconstruction, object detection, event detection, video tracking, object recognition, 3D pose estimation, learning, indexing, motion estimation, visual servoing, 3D scene modeling, and image restoration.


title: Computer vision

text: Computer vision is an interdisciplinary field that deals with how computers can be made to gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to automate tasks that the human visual system can do. "Computer vision is concerned with the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of useful information from a single image or a sequence of images. It involves the development of a theoretical and algorithmic basis to achieve automatic visual understanding." As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as video sequences, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data from a medical scanner. As a technological discipline, computer vision seeks to apply its theories and models for the construction of computer vision systems.


title: Computer vision

text: In the late 1960s, computer vision began at universities that were pioneering artificial intelligence. It was meant to mimic the human visual system, as a stepping stone to endowing robots with intelligent behavior. In 1966, it was believed that this could be achieved through a summer project, by attaching a camera to a computer and having it "describe what it saw".


title: Computer vision

text: What distinguished computer vision from the prevalent field of digital image processing at that time was a desire to extract three-dimensional structure from images with the goal of achieving full scene understanding. Studies in the 1970s formed the early foundations for many of the computer vision algorithms that exist today, including extraction of edges from images, labeling of lines, non-polyhedral and polyhedral modeling, representation of objects as interconnections of smaller structures, optical flow, and motion estimation.


title: Computer vision

text: The next decade saw studies based on more rigorous mathematical analysis and quantitative aspects of computer vision. These include the concept of scale-space, the inference of shape from various cues such as shading, texture and focus, and contour models known as snakes. Researchers also realized that many of these mathematical concepts could be treated within the same optimization framework as regularization and Markov random fields.


title: Computer vision

text: By the 1990s, some of the previous research topics became more active than others. Research in projective 3-D reconstructions led to better understanding of camera calibration. With the advent of optimization methods for camera calibration, it was realized that a lot of the ideas were already explored in bundle adjustment theory from the field of photogrammetry. This led to methods for sparse 3-D reconstructions of scenes from multiple images. Progress was made on the dense stereo correspondence problem and further multi-view stereo techniques. At the same time, variations of graph cut were used to solve image segmentation. This decade also marked the first time statistical learning techniques were used in practice to recognize faces in images (see Eigenface). Toward the end of the 1990s, a significant change came about with the increased interaction between the fields of computer graphics and computer vision. This included image-based rendering, image morphing, view interpolation, panoramic image stitching and early light-field rendering.


title: Computer vision

text: Recent work has seen the resurgence of feature-based methods, used in conjunction with machine learning techniques and complex optimization frameworks.


title: Computer vision

text: The advancement of Deep Learning techniques has brought further life to the field of computer vision. The accuracy of deep learning algorithms on several benchmark computer vision data sets for tasks ranging from classification, segmentation and optical flow has surpassed prior methods.


title: Computer vision

text: Solid-state physics is another field that is closely related to computer vision. Most computer vision systems rely on image sensors, which detect electromagnetic radiation, which is typically in the form of either visible or infrared light. The sensors are designed using quantum physics. The process by which light interacts with surfaces is explained using physics. Physics explains the behavior of optics which are a core part of most imaging systems. Sophisticated image sensors even require quantum mechanics to provide a complete understanding of the image formation process. Also, various measurement problems in physics can be addressed using computer vision, for example, motion in fluids.


title: Computer vision

text: Neurobiology has greatly influenced the development of computer vision algorithms. Over the last century, there has been an extensive study of eyes, neurons, and brain structures devoted to the processing visual stimuli in both humans and various animals. This has led to a coarse, yet convoluted, description of how natural vision systems operate in order to solve certain vision-related tasks. These results have led to a sub-field within computer vision where artificial systems are designed to mimic the processing and behavior of biological systems at different levels of complexity. Also, some of the learning-based methods developed within computer vision ("e.g." neural net and deep learning based image and feature analysis and classification) have their background in neurobiology. The Neocognitron, a neural network developed in the 1970s by Kunihiko Fukushima, is an early example of computer vision taking direct inspiration from neurobiology, specifically the primary visual cortex.


title: Computer vision

text: Some strands of computer vision research are closely related to the study of biological vision—indeed, just as many strands of AI research are closely tied with research into human intelligence, and the use of stored knowledge to interpret, integrate and utilize visual information. The field of biological vision studies and models the physiological processes behind visual perception in humans and other animals. Computer vision, on the other hand, develops and describes the algorithms implemented in software and hardware behind artificial vision systems. An interdisciplinary exchange between biological and computer vision has proven fruitful for both fields.


title: Computer vision

text: Yet another field related to computer vision is signal processing. Many methods for processing of one-variable signals, typically temporal signals, can be extended in a natural way to the processing of two-variable signals or multi-variable signals in computer vision. However, because of the specific nature of images, there are many methods developed within computer vision that have no counterpart in the processing of one-variable signals. Together with the multi-dimensionality of the signal, this defines a subfield in signal processing as a part of computer vision.


title: Computer vision

text: Robot navigation sometimes deals with autonomous path planning or deliberation for robotic systems to navigate through an environment. A detailed understanding of these environments is required to navigate through them. Information about the environment could be provided by a computer vision system, acting as a vision sensor and providing high-level information about the environment and the robot.


title: Computer vision

text: Besides the above-mentioned views on computer vision, many of the related research topics can also be studied from a purely mathematical point of view. For example, many methods in computer vision are based on statistics, optimization or geometry. Finally, a significant part of the field is devoted to the implementation aspect of computer vision; how existing methods can be realized in various combinations of software and hardware, or how these methods can be modified in order to gain processing speed without losing too much performance. Computer vision is also used in fashion eCommerce, inventory management, patent search, furniture, and the beauty industry.


title: Computer vision

text: The fields most closely related to computer vision are image processing, image analysis and machine vision. There is a significant overlap in the range of techniques and applications that these cover. This implies that the basic techniques that are used and developed in these fields are similar, something which can be interpreted as there is only one field with different names. On the other hand, it appears to be necessary for research groups, scientific journals, conferences, and companies to present or market themselves as belonging specifically to one of these fields and, hence, various characterizations which distinguish each of the fields from the others have been presented. In image processing, the input is an image and the output is an image as well, whereas in computer vision, an image or a video is taken as an input and the output could be an enhanced image, an understanding of the content of an image or even behavior of a computer system based on such understanding.


title: Computer vision

text: Computer graphics produces image data from 3D models, and computer vision often produces 3D models from image data. There is also a trend towards a combination of the two disciplines, "e.g.", as explored in augmented reality.


title: Computer vision

text: Photogrammetry also overlaps with computer vision, e.g., stereophotogrammetry vs. computer stereo vision.


title: Computer vision

text: Applications range from tasks such as industrial machine vision systems which, say, inspect bottles speeding by on a production line, to research into artificial intelligence and computers or robots that can comprehend the world around them. The computer vision and machine vision fields have significant overlap. Computer vision covers the core technology of automated image analysis which is used in many fields. Machine vision usually refers to a process of combining automated image analysis with other methods and technologies to provide automated inspection and robot guidance in industrial applications. In many computer-vision applications, computers are pre-programmed to solve a particular task, but methods based on learning are now becoming increasingly common. Examples of applications of computer vision include systems for:


title: Computer vision

text: One of the most prominent application fields is medical computer vision, or medical image processing, characterized by the extraction of information from image data to diagnose a patient. An example of this is the detection of tumours, arteriosclerosis or other malign changes; measurements of organ dimensions, blood flow, etc. are another example. It also supports medical research by providing new information: "e.g.", about the structure of the brain, or the quality of medical treatments. Applications of computer vision in the medical area also include enhancement of images interpreted by humans—ultrasonic images or X-ray images, for example—to reduce the influence of noise.


title: Computer vision

text: A second application area in computer vision is in industry, sometimes called machine vision, where information is extracted for the purpose of supporting a production process. One example is quality control where details or final products are being automatically inspected in order to find defects. One of the most prevalent fields for such inspection is the Wafer industry in which every single Wafer is being measured and inspected for inaccuracies or defects to prevent a computer chip from coming to market in an unusable manner. Another example is a measurement of the position and orientation of details to be picked up by a robot arm. Machine vision is also heavily used in the agricultural processes to remove undesirable food stuff from bulk material, a process called optical sorting.


title: Computer vision

text: Military applications are probably one of the largest areas of computer vision. The obvious examples are the detection of enemy soldiers or vehicles and missile guidance. More advanced systems for missile guidance send the missile to an area rather than a specific target, and target selection is made when the missile reaches the area based on locally acquired image data. Modern military concepts, such as "battlefield awareness", imply that various sensors, including image sensors, provide a rich set of information about a combat scene that can be used to support strategic decisions. In this case, automatic processing of the data is used to reduce complexity and to fuse information from multiple sensors to increase reliability.


title: Computer vision

text: One of the newer application areas is autonomous vehicles, which include submersibles, land-based vehicles (small robots with wheels, cars, or trucks), aerial vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The level of autonomy ranges from fully autonomous (unmanned) vehicles to vehicles where computer-vision-based systems support a driver or a pilot in various situations. Fully autonomous vehicles typically use computer vision for navigation, e.g., for knowing where they are or mapping their environment (SLAM), for detecting obstacles and/or automatically ensuring navigational safety. It can also be used for detecting certain task-specific events, "e.g.", a UAV looking for forest fires. Examples of supporting systems are obstacle warning systems in cars and systems for autonomous landing of aircraft. Several car manufacturers have demonstrated systems for autonomous driving of cars, but this technology has still not reached a level where it can be put on the market. There are ample examples of military autonomous vehicles ranging from advanced missiles to UAVs for recon missions or missile guidance. Space exploration is already being made with autonomous vehicles using computer vision, "e.g.", NASA's "Curiosity" and CNSA's "Yutu-2" rover.


title: Computer vision

text: Materials such as rubber and silicon are being used to create sensors that allow for applications such as detecting micro undulations and calibrating robotic hands. Rubber can be used in order to create a mold that can be placed over a finger, inside of this mold would be multiple strain gauges. The finger mold and sensors could then be placed on top of a small sheet of rubber containing an array of rubber pins. A user can then wear the finger mold and trace a surface. A computer can then read the data from the strain gauges and measure if one or more of the pins is being pushed upward. If a pin is being pushed upward then the computer can recognize this as an imperfection in the surface. This sort of technology is useful in order to receive accurate data on imperfections on a very large surface. Another variation of this finger mold sensor are sensors that contain a camera suspended in silicon. The silicon forms a dome around the outside of the camera and embedded in the silicon are point markers that are equally spaced. These cameras can then be placed on devices such as robotic hands in order to allow the computer to receive highly accurate tactile data.


title: Computer vision

text: Each of the application areas described above employ a range of computer vision tasks; more or less well-defined measurement problems or processing problems, which can be solved using a variety of methods. Some examples of typical computer vision tasks are presented below.


title: Computer vision

text: Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, "e.g.", in the forms of decisions. Understanding in this context means the transformation of visual images (the input of the retina) into descriptions of the world that can interface with other thought processes and elicit appropriate action. This image understanding can be seen as the disentangling of symbolic information from image data using models constructed with the aid of geometry, physics, statistics, and learning theory.


title: Computer vision

text: The classical problem in computer vision, image processing, and machine vision is that of determining whether or not the image data contains some specific object, feature, or activity. Different varieties of recognition problem are described in the literature.


title: Computer vision

text: Currently, the best algorithms for such tasks are based on convolutional neural networks. An illustration of their capabilities is given by the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge; this is a benchmark in object classification and detection, with millions of images and 1000 object classes used in the competition. Performance of convolutional neural networks on the ImageNet tests is now close to that of humans. The best algorithms still struggle with objects that are small or thin, such as a small ant on a stem of a flower or a person holding a quill in their hand. They also have trouble with images that have been distorted with filters (an increasingly common phenomenon with modern digital cameras). By contrast, those kinds of images rarely trouble humans. Humans, however, tend to have trouble with other issues. For example, they are not good at classifying objects into fine-grained classes, such as the particular breed of dog or species of bird, whereas convolutional neural networks handle this with ease.


title: Computer vision

text: Several tasks relate to motion estimation where an image sequence is processed to produce an estimate of the velocity either at each points in the image or in the 3D scene or even of the camera that produces the images. Examples of such tasks are:


title: Computer vision

text: Given one or (typically) more images of a scene, or a video, scene reconstruction aims at computing a 3D model of the scene. In the simplest case, the model can be a set of 3D points. More sophisticated methods produce a complete 3D surface model. The advent of 3D imaging not requiring motion or scanning, and related processing algorithms is enabling rapid advances in this field. Grid-based 3D sensing can be used to acquire 3D images from multiple angles. Algorithms are now available to stitch multiple 3D images together into point clouds and 3D models.


title: Computer vision

text: The aim of image restoration is the removal of noise (sensor noise, motion blur, etc.) from images. The simplest possible approach for noise removal is various types of filters such as low-pass filters or median filters. More sophisticated methods assume a model of how the local image structures look, to distinguish them from noise. By first analyzing the image data in terms of the local image structures, such as lines or edges, and then controlling the filtering based on local information from the analysis step, a better level of noise removal is usually obtained compared to the simpler approaches.


title: Computer vision

text: The organization of a computer vision system is highly application-dependent. Some systems are stand-alone applications that solve a specific measurement or detection problem, while others constitute a sub-system of a larger design which, for example, also contains sub-systems for control of mechanical actuators, planning, information databases, man-machine interfaces, etc. The specific implementation of a computer vision system also depends on whether its functionality is pre-specified or if some part of it can be learned or modified during operation. Many functions are unique to the application. There are, however, typical functions that are found in many computer vision systems.


title: Computer vision

text: Image-understanding systems (IUS) include three levels of abstraction as follows: low level includes image primitives such as edges, texture elements, or regions; intermediate level includes boundaries, surfaces and volumes; and high level includes objects, scenes, or events. Many of these requirements are entirely topics for further research.


title: Computer vision

text: The representational requirements in the designing of IUS for these levels are: representation of prototypical concepts, concept organization, spatial knowledge, temporal knowledge, scaling, and description by comparison and differentiation.


title: Computer vision

text: While inference refers to the process of deriving new, not explicitly represented facts from currently known facts, control refers to the process that selects which of the many inference, search, and matching techniques should be applied at a particular stage of processing. Inference and control requirements for IUS are: search and hypothesis activation, matching and hypothesis testing, generation and use of expectations, change and focus of attention, certainty and strength of belief, inference and goal satisfaction.


title: Computer vision

text: There are many kinds of computer vision systems; however, all of them contain these basic elements: a power source, at least one image acquisition device (camera, ccd, etc.), a processor, and control and communication cables or some kind of wireless interconnection mechanism. In addition, a practical vision system contains software, as well as a display in order to monitor the system. Vision systems for inner spaces, as most industrial ones, contain an illumination system and may be placed in a controlled environment. Furthermore, a completed system includes many accessories such as camera supports, cables and connectors.


title: Computer vision

text: Most computer vision systems use visible-light cameras passively viewing a scene at frame rates of at most 60 frames per second (usually far slower).


title: Computer vision

text: A few computer vision systems use image-acquisition hardware with active illumination or something other than visible light or both, such as structured-light 3D scanners, thermographic cameras, hyperspectral imagers, radar imaging, lidar scanners, magnetic resonance images, side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, etc. Such hardware captures "images" that are then processed often using the same computer vision algorithms used to process visible-light images.


title: Computer vision

text: While traditional broadcast and consumer video systems operate at a rate of 30 frames per second, advances in digital signal processing and consumer graphics hardware has made high-speed image acquisition, processing, and display possible for real-time systems on the order of hundreds to thousands of frames per second. For applications in robotics, fast, real-time video systems are critically important and often can simplify the processing needed for certain algorithms. When combined with a high-speed projector, fast image acquisition allows 3D measurement and feature tracking to be realized.


title: Computer vision

text: Egocentric vision systems are composed of a wearable camera that automatically take pictures from a first-person perspective.


title: Computer vision

text: As of 2016, vision processing units are emerging as a new class of processor, to complement CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs) in this role.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County ( , ) is a county in the U.S. state of Florida, located in the Miami metropolitan area. It is Florida's second-most populous county after Miami-Dade County and the 17th-most populous in the United States, with over 1.94 million residents as of the 2020 census. Its county seat and largest city is Fort Lauderdale, which had a population of 182,760 as of 2020.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County is one of the three counties that make up the Miami metropolitan area, which was home to 6.14 million people in 2020. It is also one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the entire country.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The county has 31 municipalities (including 24 incorporated cities) and many unincorporated areas. It's also Florida's seventh-largest county in terms of land area, with . Broward County's urbanized area occupies 427.8 square miles of land. The largest portion of the county is the Conservation Area that extends to the county's Western border. The conservation area is 796.9 square miles and consists of wetlands. At its widest points, the County stretches approximately 50.3 miles east to west and approximately 27.4 miles from north to south, averaging 5 to 25 feet in elevation.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The earliest evidence of Native American settlement in the Miami region came from about 12,000 years ago. The first inhabitants settled on the banks of the Miami River, with the main villages on the northern banks.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The inhabitants at the time of first European contact were the Tequesta people, who controlled much of southeastern Florida, including what is now Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and the southern part of Palm Beach County. The Tequesta Indians fished, hunted, and gathered the fruit and roots of plants for food, but did not practice any form of agriculture. They buried the small bones of the deceased with the rest of the body, and put the larger bones in a box for the village people to see. The Tequesta are credited with making the Miami Circle.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County was founded on April 30, 1915. It was intended to be named Everglades County, but then-Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Ion Farris amended the bill that established the county to name it in honor of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, governor of Florida from 1905 to 1909.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Throughout his term as governor, Broward championed Everglades drainage and was remembered for his campaign to turn the Everglades into "useful land". This opened up much of today's urban Broward County for development, first as agricultural land and later as residential. A year before Broward became governor, Dania became the first incorporated community of what is now Broward County, followed by Pompano in 1908, and Fort Lauderdale in 1911.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 1915, Palm Beach and Dade counties contributed nearly equal portions of land to create Broward County. Dixie Highway was also completed through Broward County in 1915. In 1916, the settlement of "Zona" was renamed Davie in recognition of Robert P. Davie, a land developer who purchased a great deal of reclaimed Everglades land.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County began a huge development boom after its incorporation, with the first "tourist hotel", in Fort Lauderdale, opening in 1919. A year later, developers began dredging wetlands in the county to create island communities.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The year 1925 was considered the peak of the Florida land boom with Davie, Deerfield, Floranada, and Hollywood all being incorporated. By 1925, the boom was considered to have reached its peak, but the 1926 Miami hurricane caused economic depression in the county. In 1926, the Hollywood Seminole Indian Reservation (formerly "Dania Reservation") was opened. In 1927, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea was incorporated. In 1928, the Bay Mabel Harbor (now the Port Everglades channel) was opened. In 1929, Merle Fogg Airport (now site of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport) was dedicated. In 1939, Hillsboro Beach was incorporated. Gulfstream Park also opened in Hallandale in 1939.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The county saw another population and development boom post-World War II when the transformation from agricultural to urbanized residential area began. In 1947, Pompano merged with beach area to form the present day City of Pompano Beach.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: There was another boom during the 1950s and the late 1960s. In 1953, Plantation, Lazy Lake, and Fern Crest Village were incorporated. In 1955, Margate and Miramar were incorporated. In 1956, Lighthouse Point was incorporated and the Florida Turnpike was completed through Broward County. In 1957, Pembroke Park was incorporated. In 1959, Cooper City, Lauderhill, and Sea Ranch Lakes were incorporated.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 1946 Dr. Von D. Mizell and black business owners petitioned the County Commission to make a county beach available to African Americans; at the time the beaches in Broward County, as elsewhere in Florida, were for whites only. Eight years later a beach, today Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park, in Dania Beach, was made available, but there was no road to it until 1965. In the meantime, Mizell and Eula Johnson, with supporters, deliberately violated the law on July 4, 1961, by wading into the water on Ft. Lauderdale beach. The legal process set in motion by this incident resulted in the desegregation of Broward County beaches in 1962.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 1960, the City of Pembroke Pines was incorporated. This same year marked the opening of Broward College (then Broward Community College).


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 1961, Lauderdale Lakes and Sunrise were incorporated. In 1963, the cities of Coral Springs, North Lauderdale, Parkland, and Tamarac were all incorporated. In 1967, Coconut Creek was incorporated.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The effects of a national recession hit the county in 1974 and the population growth finally slowed. This is from a peak growth percentage change of 297.9% which saw the population of Broward grow from 83,933 as of 1950 to 333,946 in 1960. The population subsequently experienced an 85.7% population growth which brought the population to a total of 620,100 in 1970.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The structure of the Broward County government was signed into law in 1975 with the passage of the Broward County charter. In the same year, the Seminole Tribe of Florida incorporated as a governing entity and began organizing cigarette sales, bingo and land leases that will bring millions of dollars in annual revenue in later years. In 1976, Interstate 95 was completed through Broward County.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: On January 19, 1977, snow fell in South Florida for the first time in recorded history. Snow was seen across all of South Florida as far south as Homestead and even on Miami Beach. Snow was officially reported by weather observers in West Palm Beach, LaBelle, Hollywood, and Royal Palm Ranger Station in southern Miami-Dade County.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: On August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew passed through Miami-Dade County, causing $100 million in damage in Broward County and leaving at least a dozen residents homeless as a result of storm related fires. Broward became a base of operations to shuttle supplies to neighbors in devastated Dade County which suffered the brunt of the storm and caused over $25 billion in damage. Hurricane Andrew caused a massive exodus from South Dade to Broward County, filling Pembroke Pines and other Broward communities with tens of thousands of transplanted families.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In the year 2000, the US census reported a total population of 1,623,018. The town of South West Ranches was incorporated this year.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: On October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida leaving the entire area damaged and causing almost universal power outages. Wilma was the most damaging storm in Broward County since Hurricane King in 1950. Broward experienced wind speeds between 80 and 100 mph (130 and 160 km/h) which endured for about five hours.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In June 2020, following the George Floyd protests, some residents called for the county to be renamed due to Governor Broward's support for segregation.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has an area of , of which is land and (8.5%) is water.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County has an average elevation of six feet (1.8 m) above sea level. It is rather new geologically and at the eastern edge of the Florida Platform, a carbonate plateau created millions of years ago. Broward County is composed of Oolite limestone while western Broward is composed mostly of Bryozoa. Broward is among the last areas of Florida to be created and populated with fauna and flora, mostly in the Pleistocene.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Of developable land in Broward County, approximately , the majority is built upon, as the urban area is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Everglades Wildlife Management Area to the west. Within developable land, Broward County has a population density of 3,740 per square mile (1,444 per square kilometer).


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward approved the construction of Osborne Reef, an artificial reef made of tires off the Fort Lauderdale beach, but it has proven an environmental disaster.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: As of the 2015 5-year ACS, Broward County had 1,843,152 people, 670,284 households, and 425,680 families. Of the 670,284 households in Broward County, 26.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 43% were married couples living together, 15.6% had a female householder with no husband present, and 36.5% were non-families. 29.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.73 and the average family size was 3.43.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In the county, the population was spread out, with 21.7% under the age of 18, 8.5% from 18 to 24, 26.9% from 25 to 44, 27.7% from 45 to 64, and 15.0% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females, there were 94.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 98.7 males.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The racial makeup of the county was 62.3% White, 30% Black or African American, 17.1% Hispanic or Latino of any race, 5.07% Asian, 2.20% from two or more races, 0.66% Native American, 0.16% Pacific Islander, and 0.20% from some other race. The racial makeup of the total Hispanic and Latino population in Broward County was: 65.8% White, 5.90% Native American, 2.06% Black or African American, 0.33% Asian, 0.86% Pacific Islander, 26.23% were some other race and 4.57% were from two or more races. In 2015, with relation to ancestry (excluding the various Hispanic and Latino ancestries), 7.38% were Italian, 7.70% American, 6.44% German, 6.54% Irish, 3.8% English, 2.6% Polish and 2.2% Russian ancestry. Also, among West Indians, 6.33% were Haitian and 5.96% were Jamaican. In 2015, 32.2% of the county's population was foreign born, with 18.14% being naturalized American citizens. Of foreign born residents, 78.9% were born in Latin America, 7.88% were born in Europe, 8.52% born in Asia, 3.11% in North America, 1.34% born in Africa and 0.15 were born in Oceania.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: As of the 2015 5-year ACS, the median income for a household in the county was $51,968, and the median income for a family was $61,809. Of full-time workers, males had a median income of $46,372 versus $39,690 for females. The per capita income for the county was $28,381. About 11.2% of families and 14.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 19.9% of those under the age 18 and 12.6% of those aged 65 or over.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 2010, 4.7% of the population considered themselves to be of only "American" ancestry (regardless of race or ethnicity.)


title: Broward County, Florida

text: , Haitians made up the largest population of immigrants, with Jamaicans coming in second, Colombians in third, followed by Cuban exiled refugees in fourth place, then Peruvians, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Dominicans, Canadians, and Mexicans being the tenth highest group of expatriates. The county also houses many British, French, German, and Spanish expatriates.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: There were 810,388 households, out of which 28.61% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 42.80% were married couples living together, 15.28% had a female householder with no husband present, and 36.67% were non-families. 28.79% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11.07% (3.31% male and 7.76% female) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.52 and the average family size was 3.14.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The age distribution is 22.4% under the age of 18, 8.4% from 18 to 24, 27.2% from 25 to 44, 27.7% from 45 to 64, and 14.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 39.7 years. For every 100 females, there were 93.9 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 91.0 males.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The median income for a household in the county was $51,694, and the median income for a family was $62,619. Males had a median income of $44,935 versus $36,813 for females. The per capita income for the county was $28,631. About 9.1% of families and 12.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 16.2% of those under age 18 and 12.2% of those aged 65 or over.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 2010, 30.9% of the county's population was foreign born, with 49.2% being naturalized American citizens. Of foreign born residents, 77.4% were born in Latin America, 9.0% were born in Europe, 8.4% born in Asia, 3.5% in North America, 1.6% born in Africa, and 0.1% were born in Oceania.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Broward County is the 9th largest county with same sex households. As of the 2010 Census, there were 9,125 same sex households out of a total of 686,047 households (1.33%).


title: Broward County, Florida

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 1,623,018 people, 654,445 households, and 411,645 families residing in the county. The population density was . There were 741,043 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the county was 70.57% White (58% were Non-Hispanic), 20.54% Black or African American, 0.24% Native American, 2.25% Asian, 0.06% Pacific Islander, 3.00% from other races, and 3.35% from two or more races. 16.74% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In 2000, with relation to ancestry (excluding the various Hispanic and Latino ancestries), 9.4% were Italian, 7.4% American, 6.8% German, 6.7% Irish, and 4% English ancestry. Also, among West Indians, 5.99% were Haitian and were 5.91% Jamaican. Broward was the only county in the nation outside the Northeast in which Italian-Americans formed the largest ethnic group in 2000. They are concentrated mainly in the Pompano Beach area.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: There were 654,445 households, out of which 29.30% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 46.1% were married couples living together, 12.5% had a female householder with no husband present, and 37.1% were non-families. 29.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and % had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.45 and the average family size was 3.07.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In the county, the population was spread out, with 23.6% under the age of 18, 7.2% from 18 to 24, 31.4% from 25 to 44, 21.7% from 45 to 64, and 16.1% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females, there were 93.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 89.8 males.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The median income for a household in the county was $41,691, and the median income for a family was $50,531. Males had a median income of $36,741 versus $28,529 for females. The per capita income for the county was $23,170. About 8.7% of families and 11.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 15.3% of those under age 18 and 10.0% of those age 65 or over.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: As of 2005, Broward County led the nation's metropolitan areas in new AIDS diagnoses, with a reported rate 58.4 new AIDS diagnoses per 100,000 people. County officials think the numbers may stem from a new and successful HIV testing campaign that has resulted in many people being diagnosed with AIDS at the same time they've been diagnosed with HIV. Without the implementation of the new testing campaign, the reported numbers of new diagnoses would have probably been lower.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: , 63.44% of all residents spoke English as their first language, while 22.22% spoke Spanish, 5.42% French Creole (mostly Haitian Creole), 1.48% Portuguese, 1.41% French, and 0.59% of the population spoke Italian as their mother language. In total, 36.56% of the population spoke languages other than English as their primary language. Since many immigrants are coming from the Anglophone Caribbean, where English is spoken, the change is not as fast as the rate of immigration would suggest.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The Broward County Charter provides for a separation between the legislative and administrative functions of government. The Board of County Commissioners is the legislative branch of Broward County Government. The County Commission is composed of nine members elected by district. Commissioners must be a resident of the district where they seek election. Each year the Commission elects a mayor and vice mayor. The mayor's functions include serving as presiding officer, and as the county's official representative. The Commission appoints the County Administrator, County Attorney and County Auditor. The commission also appoints numerous advisory and regulatory boards.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The County Commission meets in formal session the first four Tuesdays of each month at 10:00 a.m. in Room 422 of the Broward County Governmental Center. Over 507,000 cable subscribers in Broward County have access to Government-access television (GATV) coverage of Commission meetings, which are broadcast live beginning at 10:00 a.m. each Tuesday, and rebroadcast at 5:30 p.m. the following Friday. Meetings can also be viewed via webcasting at www.broward.org.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County has been a Democratic stronghold since 1992, voting for the party's presidential nominee in every election since then. It is now considered one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the state, giving greater than 60% support to the party nominee in every election since 1996. From 1948 to 1988, the county leaned Republican, voting for the Republican nominee in every election except 1976, even supporting Republican Barry Goldwater by a 56-44 margin while he lost the national election in a landslide. This change in voting tendencies can be attributed to the large migrations of middle and upper-class snowbirds and transplants from more liberal states, a growing LGBT community, liberal positions on social issues such as abortion and gun control, and naturalized U.S. citizens born in places such as Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and Asia.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: According to the Secretary of State's office, Democrats maintain a majority among registered voters in Broward County. The county is also one of the few counties in the state where Independents outnumber Republicans.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward's code of ordinances consists of resolutions, administrative rules and regulations passed in order to secure a responsive and efficient form of local government.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The county maintains a distinctive rule regarding communication between the county and bidders for county contracts, known as the "Cone of Silence". This rule prevents staff involved in a purchasing process from communicating with bidders from the time when the solicitation is issued, and County Commissioners from the time when bids are opened, until the vote to award the contract or the time when all bids are rejected.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Silver Airways has its headquarters on the property of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in an unincorporated area.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: When Chalk's International Airlines existed, its headquarters was on the grounds of the airport in an unincorporated area. When Bimini Island Air existed, its headquarters were in an unincorporated area.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: By far the largest agricultural sector is nurseries, greenhouses, floricultures, and sod. This supplies ornamental uses in the area.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County Schools, the sole school district in the county, has the sixth largest school district in the country and the second largest in the state after the Miami-Dade district.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: The Broward County Library is one of the largest public library systems in the country, comprising 38 branch locations. There are also five municipal public libraries in the county that are not part of the Broward County Library system: Ethel M. Gordon Oakland Park Library, Lighthouse Point Library, Helen B. Hoffman Plantation Library, Richard C. Sullivan Public Library of Wilton Manors, and Parkland Public Library.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Broward County libraries provide endless amount of resources to the public. For high-schoolers looking to prepare themselves for college, the library offers college readiness & SAT/ACT prep courses. For adults looking to learn computer skills, adult computer classes are also offered. These resources are free of cost, therefore, all it takes is registering to participate. In addition to the many resources offered at the library, bus passes are also sold at most Broward County libraries. If you want to enjoy some of these resources, you can simply download the app to utilize them on the go. There are nine apps available for download: Broward County Library (BCL WoW), Freegal Music, Hoopla, Overdrive, Libby, Axis 360, RBdigital Magazines, Rosetta Stone, and Brainfuse.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Additionally, with 23 miles of beach, Broward County is a popular destination for scuba diving, snorkeling, and droves of young Spring break tourists from around the world.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport serves as the primary airport of the Broward County area. The airport is bounded by the cities Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Dania Beach, three miles (5 km) southwest of downtown Fort Lauderdale and north of Miami. The airport is near cruise line terminals at Port Everglades and is popular among tourists bound for the Caribbean. Since the late 1990s, FLL has become an intercontinental gateway, although Miami International Airport still handles most long-haul flights. FLL is ranked as the 19th busiest airport (in terms of passenger traffic) in the United States, as well as the nation's 14th busiest international air gateway and one of the world's 50 busiest airports. FLL is classified by the US Federal Aviation Administration as a "major hub" facility serving commercial air traffic. In 2017 the airport processed 32,511,053 passengers (11.3% more than 2016) including 7,183,275 international passengers (18.6% more than 2016).


title: Broward County, Florida

text: A street grid stretches throughout Broward County. Most of this grid is loosely based on three primary eastern municipalities, (from South to North) Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, and Pompano Beach. Deerfield Beach—another primary eastern municipality—has its own street grid, as do two smaller municipalities—Dania Beach and Hallandale Beach.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Construction is underway on a network of recreational trails to connect cities and points of interest in the county.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: Municipality populations are based on the 2020 US Census using their QuickFacts with 5,000 residents and above, while municipalities under 5,000 people are based on their US Decennial Census.


title: Broward County, Florida

text: In the 1980s the Broward County Commission adopted a policy of having all populated places in the county be part of a municipality. Municipalities were often reluctant to annex neighborhoods which were not projected to yield enough tax revenue to cover the costs of providing services to those neighborhoods. In 2001 the Broward County Legislative Delegation adopted a policy encouraging the annexation of all unincorporated areas in Broward County into municipalities by October 1, 2005. Formerly unincorporated neighborhoods that have been annexed into existing municipalities or combined to form new municipalities include:


title: Broward County, Florida

text: By late in the first decade of the 21st century, annexation of remaining neighborhoods had stalled. the Broward County Municipal Services District serves seven unincorporated neighborhoods, including six census designated places (Boulevard Gardens, Broadview Park, Franklin Park, Hillsboro Pines, Roosevelt Gardens and Washington Park) and a parcel with a population of 72 in 2018, Hillsboro Ranches. Other areas in the developed part of the county that are not in municipalities include the Hollywood Seminole Indian Reservation, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, several landfills and resource recovery facilities, and other scattered small parcels with few or no residents.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's two flagship institutions. Its campus consists of 213 buildings on over of land in Suffolk County and it is the largest public university (by area) in the state of New York.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Opened in 1957 in Oyster Bay as the State University College on Long Island, the institution moved to Stony Brook in 1962. In 2001, Stony Brook was elected to the Association of American Universities, a selective group of major research universities in North America. It is also a member of the larger Universities Research Association. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".


title: Stony Brook University

text: Stony Brook University, in partnership with Battelle, manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, a national laboratory of the United States Department of Energy. The university acquired land for a Research & Development Park adjacent to its main campus in 2004, and has four business incubators across the region. The University's impact on the Long Island economy amounts to US$7.23 billion in increased output, and research expenditures have surpassed the US$230 million mark annually. Stony Brook is the largest single-site employer on Long Island; over 25,500 students are enrolled at the university, which has over 15,000 employees and over 2,850 faculty.


title: Stony Brook University

text: As of May 2022, Stony Brook faculty and alumni have included: 7 Nobel laureates, 2 Abel Prize recipients, at least 5 living billionaires, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 5 Fields Medalists, putting it in a tie for the seventh-most among American universities.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Stony Brook's intercollegiate athletic teams have competed in Division I of the NCAA since 1999 as the Seawolves. Stony Brook joined the Colonial Athletic Association on July 1, 2022 after competing as a member of the America East Conference since 2001.


title: Stony Brook University

text: The State University of New York at Stony Brook was established in Oyster Bay in 1957, as the State University College on Long Island (SUCOLI). Established almost a decade after the creation of New York's public higher education system, the institution was envisioned as a college for the preparation of secondary school teachers.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Leonard K. Olson was appointed as the first dean of the institution and was instrumental in the recruitment of faculty staff and planning of the later Stony Brook campus. SUCOLI opened with an inaugural class of 148 students, on the grounds of the William Robertson Coe Planting Fields estate. These first students were admitted on a tuition-free basis.


title: Stony Brook University

text: 1961 was a year of firsts as thirty students were conferred degrees in the first commencement and the university was appointed its first president, John Francis Lee. Lee left later that year due to political and bureaucratic matters regarding the future of the university and the central administration at Albany. Nevertheless, he had fulfilled his primary task of reshaping the university from a technical science and engineering college of limited degree options to a full-scale university featuring liberal arts programs.


title: Stony Brook University

text: In 1960 the Heald Report, commissioned by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, recommended a major new public university be built on Long Island to "stand with the finest in the country", a report that would ultimately shape most of the university's growth for years to come.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Ward Melville, a philanthropist and businessman from the Three Village area in western Suffolk County donated over of land to the state for the development of a state university and in 1962 the institution relocated to Stony Brook and officially renamed as the State University of New York at Stony Brook. However, the longer name has fallen out of favor; since 2005, it has usually been called simply Stony Brook University (SBU).


title: Stony Brook University

text: The campus had 782 students enrolled in 1962, but enrollment had increased more than tenfold by 1969, surpassing the 8,000 mark, fueled by the large funding of public higher education in the Sputnik era. In 1963, only three years after the release of the Heald Report, the Governor commissioned the "Education of Health Professions" (Muir Report) report. The report outlined the need for expansion of the university system to prepare medical professionals for the future needs of the state. The report was particularly important for Stony Brook as it recommended creation of a Health Science Center and academic hospital at the campus to serve the need of the fastest-growing counties (Nassau and Suffolk) in New York at the time.


title: Stony Brook University

text: In 1965, the State University appointed John S. Toll, a physicist from the University of Maryland as the second president of Stony Brook. In 1966, the university set forth initial timetables for the development of the Health Science Center, which would house the university's health programs and hospital. Despite the budgetary concerns and challenges from Albany, the university released a formalized plan early in 1968 and funding for recruitment of faculty was provided. At the same time, residential housing was expanded to 3,000, the Stony Brook Union opened in 1970, and in 1971, the massive expansion project for the campus library (named in memory of Frank Melville Jr., father of philanthropist Ward Melville) was completed.


title: Stony Brook University

text: Despite the fast-paced growth, campus infrastructure often struggled to keep pace: overcrowding, expansion, landscaping, lighting, and safety were persistent problems at the university, which led to multiple protests and growing tension between the student body and the administration. In January 1968, the infamous "Operation Stony Brook" drug raid resulted in the arrest of twenty nine students and in the fall of 1968, tension climaxed as the administration and students decided on a three-day moratorium to bring together the entire university with the goal of improving communication between the students, faculty, and administration.


title: Stony Brook University

text: The 1970s witnessed the growth of the university and its transformation as a major research institution within New York's public school system, with strong graduate programs and scientific breakthroughs like the development of magnetic resonance imaging. But the university lagged significantly in undergraduate education, prioritizing graduate education and research over undergraduate studies and student life. By 1975, enrollment had reached 16,000 and expansion crossed over Nicolls Road with the construction of the Health Science Center, which would be completed in 1980.


title: Stony Brook University

text: In 1981, John Marburger was inaugurated as the third president, and continued the expansion. By the late 1980s, the administration affirmed the need to improve other areas of the institution, which included undergraduate education, student and residential life, and intercollegiate athletics. In 1994, the university approved a decision to transition athletics to the Division I of the NCAA by 1999 and followed with the construction of the Stony Brook Arena and the expansion of the Indoor Sports Complex.


title: Stony Brook University

text: The 1990s affirmed Stony Brook's success at building a research university with a strong undergraduate education. Under the leadership of its fourth president, Shirley Strum Kenny, the administration sought out to showcase the value of the institution. Kenny was responsible for campus wide improvement projects which included large scale landscaping, renovations of every residence hall, the continued growth of the athletics programs, the improvement of student life, ever increasing research expenditures, a branding/marketing campaign, and the university's increasing ties with private philanthropy.


title: Stony Brook University

text: In the mid-1990s, the school began to distance itself from the SUNY system, as Kenny believed that the SUNY name was hurting the school's reputation.


title: Stony Brook University

text: In 1998, the university became one of the top 100 of American research universities in the U.S. News & World Report. That same year, the university and Battelle Memorial Institute were chosen by the Department of Energy as joint operators of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, joining a selective group of universities that operated national laboratories across the nation. Enrollment reached the 20,000 mark in 2001, and the administration's improvement efforts climaxed with the invitation to the highly selective Association of American Universities, an organization of sixty-two universities across North America committed to a strong system of research and education.