Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision


Modeling the Illusive Thing Called `Shape': a Mathematician's View


Stefano Soatto
UCLA


Monday, November 4, 2002, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

"We see in order to move, and we move in order to see." In this expository talk, I will explore the role of vision as a sensor for interaction with physical space. Since the complexity of the physical world is far superior to that of its measured images, inferring a generic representation of the scene is an intrinsically ill-posed problem. However, the task becomes well-posed within the context of a specific control task. I will display recent results in the inference of dynamical models of visual scenes for the purpose of motion control, shape visualization, rendering, and classification.

About the Speaker

Stefano Soatto received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1996. He joined UCLA in 2000 after being Assistant and then Associate Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University, and Research Associate in Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Between 1995 and 1998 he was also Ricercatore in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Udine, Italy. He received his D.Ing. degree (highest honors) from the University of Padova, Italy in 1992. Dr. Soatto is the recipient of the David Marr Prize (with Y. Ma, J. Kosecka and S. Sastry of U.C. Berkeley) for work on Euclidean reconstruction and reprojection up to subgroups. He was awarded the Siemens Prize with the Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his work on optimal structure from motion (with R. Brockett of Harvard). He also received the NSF Career Award and the Okawa Foundation Grant. For more details, see his research group's webpage http://vision.ucla.edu

Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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