Harvard University Computer Science Colloquium Series 33 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Colloquium Hanspeter Pfister Senior research scientist, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and visiting scholar at Harvard University. http://www.merl.com/people/pfister/ Thursday, March 22, 2007 4:00PM Maxwell Dworkin G125 (Ice Cream at 3:30PM - Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area) Abstract As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But finding the right words to describe a thousand pictures is very difficult. Today, our ability to acquire image and video data far outstrips our ability to make sense of that data. This is particularly true in the sciences, where huge amounts of image data are acquired from scanners, microscopes, telescopes, and various other instruments. For the past 20 years, visualization has focused on generating images from data. What is now needed are better methods to generate abstractions that help us to gain insights into large collections of image data. In this talk I will make the argument that modern visualization approaches require hierarchical data analysis to transform the data into meaningful, perceptually intuitive representations. I will discuss a number of data-driven hierarchical representations that tame the complexity of high-dimensional visual data. First, I will address the representation of spatially-varying appearance using a tree-structured factorization method and a new matrix decomposition algorithm. Then I will show how to generalize these ideas to decompose time-lapse video into simple and intuitive components that can be edited. Next, I will discuss the MERL face-scanning project, where we collected a database of over 400 subjects with thousands of images each in order to build high-quality statistical models of human faces. Finally, I will briefly describe the Connectome, an ongoing project with the Harvard Center for Brain Science, which aims to determine the detailed neural circuitry of the brain from nanoscale-resolution images. Host: Professor Steven J. Gortler _______________________________________________ Colloquium mailing list Colloquium(a)deas.harvard.edu https://lists.deas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloquium _______________________________________________ iic-seminars mailing list iic-seminars(a)calists.harvard.edu http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-seminars