High-Level Perception and Low-Level Vision: Bridging the Semantic Gap

Organizers: Melanie Mitchell (Portland State University and SFI), Garrett Kenyon (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Dates: October 8-10, 2007

Description of Workshop: The "semantic gap" describes the current inability of computer vision systems to connect low-level visual descriptions with the high-level conceptual schemas and analogies. Similarly, neuroscientists and psychophysicists have uncovered many of the physiological and perceptual mechanisms underlying various stages of visual processing, yet the interactions and transformations between levels remains obscure. The purpose of this workshop is to address how the semantic gap might be bridged, both in natural and computer vision, and to see if a set of common principles of visual understanding can be discovered from the collective, multidisciplinary knowledge of the participants.

Confirmed Participants:

Kathleen Akins, Philosophy, Simon Fraser University

Dana Ballard, Computer Science, University of Texas, Austin

Tony Bell, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience -- needs to register

Steven Brumby, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Shimon Edelman, Psychology, Cornell University

David Field, Psychology, Cornell University -- needs to register

John George, Biophysics, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Rob Goldstone, Psychology, Indiana University

Todd Horowitz, Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School -- needs to register

Garrett Kenyon, Biophysics, Los Alamos National Laboratory -- needs to register

Tom Kepler, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Duke University

Peter Konig, Institute for Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich -- needs to register

Bartlett Mel, Laboratory for Neural Computation, University of Southern California

Melanie Mitchell, Computer Science, Portland State University and SFI

Ilya Nemenman, Computational Biology, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Reid Porter, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Lakshman Prasad, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Pam Reinagel, Neurobiology, UCSD

Fritz Sommer, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience

Christof Teuscher, Modeling, Algorithms, and Informatics, Los Alamos National Laboratory

James Theiler, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Simon Thorpe, Centre de Recherche Cerveau and Cognition (Toulouse) and CNRS