U.S.-Uruguay Workshop: Vision in Brains and Machines, Montevideo, Uruguay, November, 2006

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This U.S.-Uruguay workshop award to Michael J. Black of Brown University will support the travel of 18 senior and junior researchers from US institutions to a workshop on "Vision in Brains and Machines" to be held in Montevideo Uruguay in November, 2006. Uruguayan organizers are Angel Caputi, a sensory neurophysiologist at the Clemente Estable Institute for Biological Investigations, and Gregory Randall, an expert in image analysis at the University of the Republic, both in Montevideo. The workshop will bring together researchers in the areas of neuroscience applied to human vision and of computer vision to explore the current state of the art in both fields and to find unexplored connections and collaborations. The workshop will combine background courses for students, lectures by leading researchers, and focused discussion groups exploring how each field and can learn from and leverage the other's results. New research directions resulting from roundtable discussions will be synthesized and broadly distributed. The activity of synthesizing biological and machine perspectives on perception has benefits not just for the researchers but also for society in terms of potentially new treatments for vision loss (e.g. prostheses) and new machine-vision-enabled technologies. This workshop will enable South American researchers and students to interact with internationally recognized leaders in human neuroscience and machine vision and should foster interactions with senior and junior US researchers that could result in future research collaborations. This award is supported by the Americas Program of the Office of International Science and Engineering, and the Robust Intelligence Cluster of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.