Polly Cohen Johnsen
Polly Cohen Johnsen is an American film executive and producer. She went to college at the University of California at San Diego, where she majored in Chinese, and is also a graduate of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California.
Johnsen began her career working at Warner Bros. in the physical production department while in graduate school. She then became a story editor for producers Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg at Jersey Films, where she worked on such projects as Gattaca. During her tenure at Jersey Films she teamed up with producer Roy Lee and Glen Gregory of Propaganda Films to create an online tracking board, where script readers could discuss the scripts they read. Online tracking boards have since become a useful tool throughout the film industry.
Johnsen re-joined Warner Bros. in 1997 as a creative executive and worked on such movies as Three Kings, The Perfect Storm and Analyze This. She was promoted to production executive in 1998 and then to vice president, production in 1999. In 2003 she was named senior vice president, production and in 2006, executive vice president, production. As an executive, she was noted for recommending the first Harry Potter book for a potential film series, which became one of the studio's most successful franchises of all time. As a senior executive, she oversaw the Harry Potter films, Blood Diamond, I Am Legend, the Scooby Doo series, and Superman Returns, among others.
Polly
Polly is a nickname for Mary, and is derived from another nickname for Mary, Molly. It is sometimes used as a name in its own right.
Women
Polly (robot)
Polly was a robot created at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Ian Horswill for his PhD and published in 1993 as a technical report.
Polly was the first mobile robot to move at animal-like speeds (1m per second) using computer vision for its navigation. It was an example of behavior based robotics. Horswill's PhD supervisors were Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein. For a few years Polly gave tours of the AI laboratory's seventh floor, using canned speech to point out landmarks such as Anita Flynn's office. When someone approached Polly, it would introduce itself and offer a tour, asking them to answer by waving their foot.
The "Polly algorithm" is a way to navigate in a cluttered space using very low resolution vision to find uncluttered areas to move forward into, assuming that the pixels at the bottom of the frame (the closest to the robot) show an example of an uncluttered area. Since this could be done 60 times a second, the algorithm only needed to discriminate three categories: telling the robot at each instant to go straight, towards the right or towards the left.
Polly (The Kinks song)
Polly, sometimes mislabeled as Pretty Polly, is a song by British rock group The Kinks. It was released as the B-side of their 1968 single "Wonderboy". "Wonderboy" peaked at number 36 on the UK Singles Charts, becoming the first major Kinks single since 1964 to be a relative commercial failure. It also peaked at number six in The Netherlands.
"Polly" later appeared as a bonus track on the 1998 and 2004 CD reissues of Something Else by The Kinks.
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