Albert Cruz graduated from the University of California, Riverside in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus on Intelligent Systems. During his undergraduate studies he participated in the NSF REU Bioengineering Research Institute for Technical Excellence 2007 where he automated a study of protein localization in pollen tube growth and presented a paper proposal at the Workshop on Bio-Image Informatics 2008. In 2014 he recieved his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Riverside. 

Under the mentorship of Bir Bhanu, he workined in the Center of Research in Intelligent Systems as a Ph.D. student with a primary focus in biologically inspired models for video-based face and emotion recognition. His interesters were emulating the behavior of the human visual system for identification in situations where state-of-the-art computer methods fail; the goal being to create a system robust enough to operate in unconstrained settings, as the HVS is. He mentored undergraduate research projects in pollen tube growth localization where a novel optical flow algorithm was proposed that handled the unique rigid and non-rigid dynamics of a pollen tube, video-based emotion recognition, and camera network tracking and calibration in the framework of an optimization problem to be solved online using co-evolutionary genetic programming. 

Link to Albert's Ph.D. Dissertation 

Currently Albert is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at California State University Bakersfield