Summary The question of how we perceive and interact with the world around us has been at the heart of cognitive and neuroscience research for the last decades. Despite tremendous advances in the field of computational vision – made possible by the development of powerful learning techniques as well as the existence of large amounts of labeled training data for harvesting - artificial systems have yet to reach human performance levels and generalization capabilities. In this contribution we want to highlight some recent results from perceptual studies that could help to bring artificial systems a few steps closer to this grand goal. In particular, we focus on the issue of spatio-temporal object representations (dynamic faces), face synthesis, as well as the need for taking into account multi-sensory data in models of object categorization. In all of these perceptual research lines, the underlying research philosophy was to combine the latest tools in computer vision, computer graphics, and computer simulations in order to gain a deeper understanding of recognition and categorization in the human brain. Conversely, we discuss how the perceptual results can feed back into the design of better and more efficient tools for artificial systems.
Resume Heinrich Bülthoff is scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen.
He is head of the Psychophysics Department in which a group of about 70 biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and psychologists work on psychophysical and computational aspects of higher level visual processes in the following areas: object and face recognition, sensory-motor integration, spatial cognition, computer graphics psychophysics, and perception and behavior in virtual environments.
Prof. Bülthoff is involved in many international collaborations on these topics and member of the European research network ECVision, Enactive and Intuition. He is currently involved in the following projects funded by the European Commission: JAST, CyberWalk, BACS, ImmerSense, Wayfinding and Poeticon.
He holds a Ph.D. degree in the natural sciences from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen. From 1980 to 1988 he worked as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of Cognitive Science at Brown University in Providence from 1988-1993 before becoming director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. Since 1996 he is also Honorary Professor at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen and from 2004 to 2009 Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. |
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| ShanghAI Lectures 2010 |
Planning for the ShanghAI Lectures 2010 has started. There will be another round of videoconference lectures, complemented with discussions and exercises in the collaborative virtual environment. Intended start: 30 September 2010. For updates regarding the project, subscribe to the mailing list (don't worry: very low traffic). |
| Lecture 10 online |
| The SWITCHcast recordings of Lecture 10 (introduction, panel discussion) are available now, as well as the guest talks by Wenwei Yu, Hiroshi Yokoi, Adrianne Wortzel, and Xiaoan Li. |
| Lecture 9 online |
| The SWITCHcast recording of Lecture 9 is available now, as well as the guest talks by Alois Knoll/Mary Ellen Foster/Manuel Giuliani and Sukhan Lee. |
| Lecture 8 online |
| The SWITCHcast recording of Lecture 8 is available now, as well as the guest talks by Samia Nefti-Meziani and Christopher Lueg. |
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