[Colloquium] Talk by Hanspeter Pfister on January 4, 2012

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: RY 251

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Speaker:		Hanspeter Pfister

From:		Harvard University

Web page:	http://gvi.seas.harvard.edu/pfister

Title: 		Visual Computing in Connectomics

Abstract: Our modern ability to acquire and generate huge amounts of data can potentially enable rapid progress in science and engineering, but we may not live up that promise if our ability to create data outstrips our ability to make sense of that data. In this talk I will present our work on visual computing in Connectomics, a new field in neuroscience that aims to apply biology and computer science to the grand challenge of determining the detailed neural circuitry of the brain. I will give an overview of the computational challenges and describe interactive visualization approaches that we developed to discover and analyze the brain's neural network. The key to our methods is to keep the user in the loop, either for providing input to our downstream reconstruction methods, or for validation and corrections of the reconstructed neural structures. The main challenges we face are how to visualize petabytes of image data in an efficient and scalable way, how to automatically reconstruct very large and dense neural circuits from the nanoscale-resolution electron micrographs, and how to analyze the brain's neural network once we have discovered it.

Bio:
Hanspeter Pfister is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision. It spans a wide range of topics, including bio-medical visualization, 3D reconstruction, GPU computing, and data-driven methods in computer graphics. Before joining Harvard he worked for over a decade at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories where he was most recently Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist. Dr. Pfister has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement award. He has authored over 40 US patents and over 80 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, including 19 ACM SIGGRAPH papers, the premier forum in Computer Graphics. He is co-editor of the first textbook on Point-Based Computer Graphics, published by Elsevier in 2007. You can contact him atpfister at seas.harvard.edu.

Host: Gordon Kindlmann

Refreshments will be served in Ryerson 255 following the talk at 3:30.
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