New: Computational science lecture series

From left: Computer Science Professor Steve Wright, ECE Professor Nigel Boston and Associate Professor Robert Nowak created the Computational Sciences Lecture Series to bring together researchers from mathematics, computer science and engineering. (34K JPG)

The Computational Sciences Lecture Series (CSLS) presented lectures by Donald Geman, Michael Miller and Stefano Soatto on "Computational Vision and Image Analysis" Thursday, October 30th. The goal of the series is to bring together researchers from mathematics (pure and applied), computer science, and engineering to promote cross-fertilization between these fields and to establish computational science as an active research discipline at UW-Madison. The CSLS consists of several half-day meetings during each year, each meeting consisting of three lectures grouped around a common theme, and presented by distinguished researchers.

The first meeting in this series focused on Computational Vision and Image Analysis. Great advances have been made in the acquisition of image data, from conventional photography, satellite imaging, and CT scanning to the now ubiquitous digital cameras embedded in cell phones and other wireless devices. And though the semantic understanding of the shapes and other objects appearing in images is effortless for human beings, the corresponding problem in machine perception, namely automatic interpretation via computer programs, remains a major open challenge in modern science.

A second workshop on graphical models is scheduled for Feb. 19, 2004.