Prof. Andrew Blake visits School: XBox 360 Kinect / Whittaker Colloquium
Professor Andrew Blake (Founding Director of the Alan Turing Institute) will be visiting the School of Mathematics on the afternoon of Friday, 27th May. He will give two presentations, both in Lecture Room A of JCMB.
3.00-3.3PM Professor Blake will give an informal presentation on the XBox 360 Kinect. While working for Microsoft he led the team which designed Kinect, which allows controller-free computer gaming, and many other applications.
3.30-4.00PM Coffee/tea will be served on the 3rd floor of JCMB.
4.00-5.00PM Whittaker Colloquium
Title: "Machines that see – powered by probability"
Abstract: The newly established Alan Turing Institute researches data science, at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, computer science, social science and software engineering. One of the core topics at that intersection is probabilistic processing. For example, machines that see cannot, it turns out, be programmed directly, but must learn from data, and that involves computing with probabilities. Such machines bring benefits to safety, consumer experiences, and healthcare, and their operation is based on mathematical ideas.These ideas fit into a philosophy of vision as inference: exploring hypotheses for the contents of a scene that explain an image as fully as possible. More recently this explanatory approach has partly given way to powerful, direct estimation methods, whose operating parameters are learned from large data sets. Perhaps the most capable vision systems will come ultimately from some kind of fusion of the two approaches.