Title:  Recursive Compositional Models for Computational Vision
Alan Yuille, Departments of Statistics, Computer Science and Psychology, UCLA

Recursive Compositional Models (RCMs) are a class of probability models designed to detect, recognize, parse, and segment visual objects and label visual scenes. They take into account the statistical and computational complexities of visual patterns. The key design principle is recursive compositionality. Visual patterns are represented by RCMs in a hierarchical form where complex structures are composed of more elementary structures. Probabilities are defined over these structures exploiting properties of the hierarchy (e.g. long range spatial relationships can be represented by local potentials). The compositional nature of this representation enables efficient learning and inference algorithms. Hence the overall architecture of RCMs provides a balance between statistical and computational complexity.

Joint work with L. Zhu and Y. Chen.

Bio: 

Alan received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1976, and completed his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Cambridge in 1980. Following this, he held a postdoc position with the Physics Department, University of Texas at Austin, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara. He then joined the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (1982-1986), and followed this with a faculty position in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard (1986-1995), rising to the position of associate professor. From 1995-2002 Alan worked as a senior scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco.  In 2002 he accepted a position as full professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He has joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Psychology. He has over two hundred peer-reviewed publications in vision, neural networks, and physics, and has co-authored two books: Data Fusion for Sensory Information Processing Systems (with J. J. Clark) and Two- and Three- Dimensional Patterns of the Face (with P. W. Hallinan, G. G. Gordon, P. J. Giblin and D. B. Mumford); he also co-edited the book Active Vision (with A. Blake).