BMI seminar announcement

Title: Behavior Imaging and the Study of Autism
Speaker: Jim Rehg (Georgia Tech)
Location: 140 Bardeen (12:00 noon, 3/8/2012)

Abstract: In this talk I will describe current research efforts in
Behavior Imaging, a new research field which encompasses the
measurement, modeling, analysis, and visualization of social and
communicative behaviors from multi-modal sensor data. Beginning in
infancy, individuals acquire the social and communicative skills which
are vital for a healthy and productive life, through face-to-face
interactions with caregivers and peers. However, children with
developmental delays face great challenges in acquiring these skills,
resulting in substantial lifetime risks. Autism, for example, affects
1 in 110 children in the U.S. and can lead to substantial impairments,
resulting in a lifetime cost of care of $3.2M per person. The goal of
our research in Behavior Imaging is to develop computational methods
that can support the fine-grained and large-scale measurement and
analysis of social behaviors, with the potential to positively impact
diagnosis and treatment. I will present an overview of our research
efforts in Behavior Imaging, with a particular emphasis on the use of
computer vision techniques. Specifically, I will describe a new
approach to video analysis based on the concept of temporal causality,
which leverages a novel representation of video events as multiple
point processes. Our method provides a new bottom-up approach to video
segmentation based on the temporal structure of video events. I will
present results for retrieving and categorizing social interactions in
collections of real-world video footage. I will also highlight our
recent efforts in the semi-supervised recognition of objects and
activities from egocentric video.
This is joint work with KarthirPrabhakar, Alireza Fathi, and Sangmin Oh.

Speaker Bio: James M. Rehg (pronounced "ray") is a Professor in the
School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, where he is the Director of the Center for Behavior
Imaging, co-Director of the Computational Perception Lab, and
Associate Director of Research in the Center for Robotics and
Intelligent Machines. He received his Ph.D.from CMU in 1995 and worked
at the Cambridge Research Lab of DEC (and then Compaq) from 1995-2001,
where he managed the computer vision research group. He received the
National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2001, and the
Raytheon Faculty Fellowship from Georgia Tech in 2005.He and his
students have received a number of best paper awards, including best
student paper awards at ICML 2005 and BMVC 2010. Dr. Rehg is active in
the organizing committees of the major conferences in computer vision,
most-recently serving as the General co-Chair for IEEE CVPR 2009. He
has served on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of
Computer Vision since 2004. He has authored more than 100
peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 23 issued US patents. Dr.
Rehg is currently leading a multi-institution effort to develop the
science and technology of Behavior Imaging, funded by an NSF
Expedition award (see www.cbs.gatech.edu for details).