Keynote Lecture

Computer Aided-Visual Perception : Challenges and Perspectives

Professor Nikos Paragios
Ecole Centrale de Paris / INRIA Saclay, Ile-de-France
France
E-mail: nikos.paragios@ecp.fr

Abstract: Computer aided human perception aims at developing intelligent algorithms towards understanding visual cues coming from images, video, or other means of gathering visual information. Such a process often consists of three stages, initially the problem of perception is parameterized through a mathematical model where the estimation of its parameters will lead to visual understanding. Then, the model is associated with the available observations through the definition of an objective function and last, this function is optimized using computational methods. The main challenges that one has to address in this context is the curses of dimensionality, non-linearity, non-convexity and modularity. In simple words, even the simplest possible perception problem could involve too many parameters where the association between the data and them is not straightforward and is done through non-convex functions. In this talk, we will present a generic mathematical framework that exploits recent advances in discrete optimization to address computational visual perception. Numerous image processing, computer-aided diagnosis and computer vision applications will be considered to demonstrate the potentials of this method.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Nikos Paragios (http://vision.mas.ecp.fr) obtained his B.Sc. (highest honors, valedictorian) and M.Sc. (highest honors) in Computer Science from the University of Crete (Greece) [1994,1996] , his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from I.N.R.I.A. [2000] and his D.Sc. (Habilitation a Diriger de Recherches) from the University of Nice/Sophia Antipolis (France) [2005)]. He is professor of applied mathematics at the Ecole Centrale de Paris - one of most exclusive engineering schools "Grande Ecoles" - leading the Medical Imaging and Computer Vision Group. He is also affiliated with INRIA Saclay Ile-de-France, the French Research Institute in Informatics and Control heading the GALEN group. Prior to that he was professor/(2004-2005) at the Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chaussees, affiliated with Siemens Corporate Research (Princeton, NJ, 1999-2004) as a project manager, senior research scientist and research scientist. In 2002 he was an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and in 2004 at New York University. N. Paragios was a visiting professor at Yale University in 2007.
Professor Paragios has co-edited four books, published more than hundred papers (DBLP server) in the most prestigious journals and conferences of medical imaging and computer vision, gave more that hundred invited lectures, and has twelve US issued patents and more than twenty pending. His work has approx 3,500 citations in googlescholar and approx 2,000 in scopus, and and his H-number according to scholar is 28 and 24 according to scopus. He is a Senior member of IEEE, associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), area editor for the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal (CVIU) and member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), the Medical Image Analysis Journal (MedIA) and the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision (JMIV). Professor Paragios is one of the program chairs of the 11th European Conference in Computer Vision (ECCV'10, Heraklion, Crete). In 2008 N. Paragios was the laureate of one of Greece's highest honor for young academics and scientists of nationality or descent (world-wide), the Bodossaki Foundation Prize in the field of applied sciences. In 2006, he was named one of the top 35 innovators in science and technology under the age of 35 from the MIT's Technology Review magazine. He and his collaborators were the recipients of numerous scientific rewards, like for example the Francois Erbsmann prize for the IPMI'07 conference. His research interests are in the areas of computer vision, medical image analysis and human-computer interaction.