BIOGRAPHY
The first part of my research is in computer vision - how computers interpret images. I'm trying to contribute to the understanding of object recognition, which is part of artificial intelligence. Among its practical uses are military target recognition and optical character recognition in which an image is transformed into text. The main goal is to interpret highly ambiguous images, a task that is not solved very well by current algorithms. What characterizes our approach is that it is compositional. A face is made of eyes, nose, mouth, and each of these is made of simpler constituents, and there are rules that guide how these constituents come together in an image. We try to derive composition rules by studying natural images. We also try to learn the parameters of these rules by statistical methods. The other part of my research is in theoretical neuroscience. We are searching animal behavior data for specific temporal patterns that may shed light on the mechanisms used by the brain to construe separate parts into a whole object.
I love the interdisciplinary aspect of this research. I was attracted by both the mathematics and the neuroscience in it. I like to use my imagination to create theories that are abstract by their nature but can be tested.
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