Invited Talk by Prof. Pascal Fua

Prof. Pascal Fua Computer Vision Group EPFL, Switzerland Date: Thursday, 27 January 2012 Time: 10:00 Location: MI 03.13.010

Modeling Brain Circuitry over a Wide Range of Scales

Abstract:

Electron microscopes (EM) can now provide the nanometer resolution that is needed to image synapses, and therefore connections, while Light Microscopes (LM) see at the micrometer resolution required to model the 3D structure of the dendritic network. Since both the arborescence and the connections are integral parts of the brain's wiring diagram, combining these two modalities is critically important.

In this talk, I will therefore present our approach to building the dendritic arborescence and to tracking migrating neurons from LM images, as well as to segmenting intra-neuronal structures from EM images. I will also argue that the techniques that are in wide usage in the Computer Vision and Machine Learning community are just as applicable in this context.

Biography: Prof. Pascal Fua has worked on various aspects of computer vision and augmented reality, including shape and motion recovery, human body modeling, real-time registration, and the use of information theory. He now heads the Computer Vision Laboratory.

Before joining EPFL in 1996, Prof. Pascal Fua worked at SRI International and at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a computer scientist. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and won the best paper award at CVPR 2005 and the best demonstration award at BMVC 2003.

The research activities of the Computer Vision Laboratory focus on shape and motion recovery from images, object and people detection and tracking in video sequences, and analysis of brain microscopy image-stacks. CVLab also provides undergraduate and graduate teaching and performs technology transfer to both established and start up companies.

Prof. Pascal Fua's research is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the CTI, the European Union, and several industrial partners.