▶ Subject: Towards artificial systems: what can we learn from human perception
▶ Date: Thursday, September 9th, 2010.
▶ Venue: Shinyang Humanities Hall International Conference Room
Abstract
The question of how we perceive and interact with the world around us has been at the heart of cognitive and neuroscience research for the last decades. Despite tremendous advances in the field of computational vision made possible by the development of powerful learning techniques as well as the existence of large amounts of labeled training data for harvesting-artificial systems have yet to reach human performance levels and generalization capabilities. In this contribution we want to highlight some recent results from perceptual studies that could help to bring artificial systems a few steps closer to this grand goal. In particular, we focus on the issue of spatio-temporal object representations (dynamic faces), face synthesis, as well as the need for taking into account multi-sensory data in models of object categorization. Having understood the important role of haptic feedback for human perception, we also explored new ways of exploiting it for helping humans (pilots) in solving difficult control tasks. This recent work on human machine interfaces naturally extends to the case of autonomous or intelligent machines such as robots that are currently envisioned to be pervasive in our society and closely cooperate with humans in their tasks. In all of these perceptual research lines, the underlying research philosophy was to combine the latest tools in computer vision, computer graphics, and virtual reality technology in order to gain a deeper understanding of biological information processing. Conversely, we discuss how the perceptual results can feed back into the design of better and more efficient tools for artificial systems.
More about the Lecturer
Heinrich Bülthoff is scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. He is head of the Psychophysics Department in which a group of about 70 biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and psychologists work on psychophysical and computational aspects of perception and cognition.
He holds a Ph.D. degree in the natural sciences from the Eberhard-Karls- Universität in Tübingen. From 1980 to 1988 he worked as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was Assistant, Associate and Full Professor of Cognitive Science at Brown University in Providence from 1988-1993 before becoming director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. Since 1996 he is also Honorary Professor at the Eberhard-Karls- Universität in Tübingen and from 2004 to 2009 Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. Since 2009 he is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering at Korea University.
Institute of Cognitive Science
Seoul National University