About the program: Vision is easy - or so it seems to if you have not tried to get a robot to see: Objects appear to us to be nicely segmented, in high resolution, easy to identify and grasp, but the reality is quite different. Although computers are trillions of times faster than they were 50 years ago, they can't see very well, nor do we have robots running around. I will argue that we have been trying to solve the wrong problem and that nature has evolved a visual system that represents the world in a utilitarian way, based on constraints from the motor system and learnability. The DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle race in 2005 was won by a team from Stanford that used this strategy.
About the Speaker: Terrence Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Professor of Biology and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Director of the Institute for Neural Computation. The long-range goal of Dr. Sejnowski's laboratory is to understand the computational resources of brains and to build linking principles from brain to behavior using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level. Hippocampal and cortical slice preparations are being used to explore the properties of single neurons and synapses, including the precision of spike firing and the influence of neuromodulators. Biophysical models of electrical and chemical signal processing within neurons are used as an adjunct to physiological experiments. New techniques have been developed for modeling cell signaling using Monte Carlo methods (MCell). His laboratory has developed new methods for analyzing the sources for electrical and magnetic signals recorded from the scalp and hemodynamic signals from functional brain imaging by blind separation using independent components analysis (ICA).
Time/Place: Wednesday Dec 13, Wednesday 6:00 P.M. Lockheed Martin, 4770 Eastgate Mall San Diego, California 92121. Food served starting at 6:00 p.m., talk will begin sharply at 6:30. Directions and lecture background materials available at the SD CIS website. http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/san_diego/cis/
Free for IEEE members, $5 otherwise.
Reservations/Information: Andrew Diamond (IEEE CIS San Diego Chapter Chair) (858) 509-3115, adiamond@EnvisionSystemsLLC.com