Andrew Blake, 'Computer Science and Illusion' presentation in Dublin, September 6th

A highly respected Senior Researcher from Microsoft Research in Cambridge is visiting Dublin on Wednesday September 6th to give an evening's presentation titled Computer Science and Illusion: A Computational View of the Interpretation and Manipulation of Images. 

Professor Andrew Blake has made major contributions to the field of Computer Vision, and he is also an accessible and eloquent speaker.  You are very welcome to attend the presentation at Trinity College that evening, which will explore some connections between visual perception, geometry, and computer processing of images.

The talk promises to be fascinating even for those without a background in computer vision (or computer science!).  Click here for more information and to register.

 

Professor Blake leads the Vision Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.  I met him when I visited the lab a few months ago.  His current research spans image interaction, stereo vision, and motion tracking.

You'll know his name if you've taken a first course on computer vision, as several of his papers (from both Microsft Research and Oxford) would feature on the reading list, including the seminal Contour Tracking by Stochastic Propagation of Conditional Density, in which the authors introduce the Condensation algorithm, which assists in the challenge of tracking curves in dense visual clutter.  The paper won the Best Paper prize of the European Vision Society that year.

Back at MSRC in May, Professor Blake showed me some of the Vision Group's recent work, including AutoCollage, a technique for attractively stitching together collages of images, and Real-time stereo vision, which promises to facilitate significantly improved webcam interactions (among many other things).

Object Class Recognition is another computer vision challenge that's being explored at MSRC.  To see a demo of the technology at work, follow the link and check out the cool summary video, Object Class Recognition at a Glance, which explains the experimental setup, highlights recent results from the group, and even has comic timing (13MB, .wmv format).

 

But just to be sure, the presentation on the 6th is designed to be intriguing even for those without a background in computer vision.  So if you're in the area, and keen to get your mind racing, head out to Trinity for the evening and I'll see you there!  Again, here's the link to more information and registration. 

 

One quick note:

If you are inclined to do a deep exploration of Computer Vision, you can download several of Prof. Blake's books for free online, including "Visual Reconstruction" with A.Zisserman (MIT press), "Active Vision" with A. Yuille (MIT Press) and "Active Contours" with M. Isard (Springer-Verlag).

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2006
  If you're in the Dublin area, don't forget that Andrew Blake from Microsoft Research will be presenting...
• Anonymous
  September 04, 2006
  If you're in the Dublin area, don't forget that Andrew Blake from Microsoft Research will be presenting...
• Anonymous
  September 06, 2006
  Andrew Blake, 'Computer Science and Illusion' presentation in Dublin, September 6thLecture Abstract and...