Dr. Tomaso Poggio
Learning in Brains and Machines
Wednesday, May 23, 2001
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00PM)

Goddard's Office of the Assistant Director for Information Sciences and Chief Information Officer announces the final GSFC Information Sciences and Technology (IS&T) Colloquium presentation of the Spring 2001 Series.
Dr. Tomaso Poggio, Co-Director of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Whitaker Professor of Vision Sciences and Biophysics, will talk about Learning in Brains and Machines. Understanding how biological visual systems perform object recognition is one of the ultimate goals in computational neuroscience. From the computational viewpoint of learning, the different recognition tasks -- such as categorization and identification -- are similar, representing different trade-offs between specificity and invariance. Professor Poggio will review briefly the issue of representation, looking at some of the recent trends in computational vision and then focus on feedforward, view-based biological models that are supported by psychophysical and physiological data.

Dr. Poggio currently holds the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professorship of Vision Sciences and Biophysics at the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and he is also affiliated with MIT's Artifical Intelligence Laboratory.
In addition, since 1993, he has been Co-Director of
MIT's Center for Biological and Computational Learning. Professor Poggio's original training was as a theoretical physicist (he received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Genoa in 1970) and his current research focuses on the application of new learning techniques to time series analysis, object recognition, adaptive control and computer graphics.

* This is a Special Colloquium, held in conjunction with presentation of the Center's first annual Excellence in Information Science and Technology Award. The ceremony will honor the Goddard employee who best exhibits broad accomplishment in the area of information science and technology.

For information about award criteria, or to submit a nomination, visit http://ohr.gsfc.nasa.gov/hot/ExcelISTAward.htm or http://ISandTColloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/award.htm

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Dr. Milt Halem
halem@gsfc.nasa.gov