When: Thursday, September 30, 2:00 p.m.

Where: 3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Dr. Harry Shum, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia

Special Industry Presentation

Abstract:
For many years, computer vision researchers have worked hard chasing the illusive goals such as can the robot find a boy in the sceneor can your vision system automatically segment the cat from the background. These tasks require a lot of prior knowledge and contextual information. How to incorporate prior knowledge and contextual information into vision systems, however, is very challenging. In this talk, we propose that many difficult vision tasks can only be solved with interactive vision systems, by combining powerful and real-time vision techniques with intuitive and clever user interfaces. I will show two interactive vision systems we developed recently, Lazy Snapping (Siggraph 2004) and Poisson Matting (Siggraph 2004), where Lazy Snapping cuts out an object with solid boundary, while Poisson Matting recovers soft boundary (matte) as well. A key element in designing such interactive systems is how we model the users intention using conditional probability (context) and likelihood associated with user interactions. Given how ill-posed most image understanding problems are, I am convinced that interactive computer vision is the paradigm we should focus todays vision research on.

I will also give a quick overview of Microsoft Research Asia, including our activities in research and technology transfer. Time permitting, I will present a few exciting computer vision technologies which have made their way into Microsoft products.

Bio:
Harry Shum received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. He worked as a researcher for three years in the vision technology group at Microsoft Research Redmond. In 1999, he moved to Microsoft Research Asia where he is currently the Managing Director. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, human computer interaction, pattern recognition, statistical learning and robotics. He is on the editorial boards for IEEE Transactions on Circuit System Video Technology (CSVT), IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), and Graphical Models. He is the General Co-Chair of Tenth International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2005 Beijing).

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