SUnS 09 features 16 speakers and about 20 poster presenters from a variety of disciplines (neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, visual cognition, computational neuroscience and computer vision) who will address a range of topics related to scene and natural image understanding, attention, eye movements, visual search, and navigation.

Registration: click here to register (admission is free and open to the research community)
Posters: If you wish to present a poster together with a 1-2 minutes spotlight at SUnS 09, send an email to Antonio Torralba (torralba@csail.mit.edu) with list of authors, title and a short abstract, by January 26.

Schedule:

Download Progam_at_a_glance

Download Abstract of Talks ------ Download Abstract of Posters

 
FRIDAY, JANUARY 30
8:15
BREAKFAST
VISUAL SEARCH & ATTENTIONAL GUIDANCE IN SCENES
8:45 Context rules supreme in visual search through real-world scenesAude Oliva, Krista Ehinger, Barbara Hidalgo-Sotelo & Antonio Torralba (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) slides poster
9:00 A population code for selecting saccade targets during search Gregory Zelinsky (SUNY Stony Brook) slides article
9:25 SUN: A model of visual salience using natural statisticsGarrison Cottrell (University of California, San Diego) slides demo1 demo2 demo3 poster article
9:50
COFFEE BREAK
10:10 Bottom-up and top-down guidance of visual attention in natural environmentsLaurent Itti (University of Southern California)
10:30 Search in real scenes: The latest mysteries, the latest cluesJeremy Wolfe (Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School) slides
10:50 The influence of complex visual context, eye movements, and attention on visual processing and perceptionMichael Paradiso (Brown University), Octavio Ruiz, Xin Huang, Sean MacEvoy & Cathy Clarke
11:15
COFFEE BREAK
 
NEURAL MECHANISMS OF NATURAL VISION
11:30 Physiological responses in human visual cortex during dynamic viewing conditionsGabriel Kreiman, Hesheng Liu, Yigal Agam & Joseph Madsen (Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School)
11:50 A hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortexUri Hasson (Princeton University) slides article
12:15
POSTER SPOTLIGHTS
12:40
LUNCH - POSTER
 
VISUAL ROUTINES FOR IMAGE UNDERSTANDING
2:00 What should we mean by "scene"? David Forsyth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) slides
2:25 Dense scene alignmentCe Liu, Jenny Yuen, & Antonio Torralba (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) related material
2:45 Recursive compositional models for visionAlan Yuille (University of California Los Angeles) slides
3:10 How big is it?Daniel Kersten (University of Minnesota) slides
3:35 Looking at things and stuffEdward Adelson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) slides
3:55
COFFEE BREAK
 
EXPLORING VIRTUAL & DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS
4:10 The challenges of dynamic environmentsMary Hayhoe (University of Texas at Austin) slides article
4:40 The geometry of spatial knowledge for navigationWilliam Warren (Brown University) slides
5:10 Concluding remarks
5:15
RECEPTION

 

Organizers:

Event Coordinator:
Location: MIT
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
43 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139-
Bldg 46-3002 (campus map)
Sponsors: The Scene Understanding Symposium series is an educational initiative from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. We wish to thank for their sponsoring: the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the National Science Foundation (IIS-CAREER Award to Aude Oliva, No. 0546262, and IIS-CAREER Award to Antonio Torralba, No. 0747120), the National Institutes of Health Graduate Training Grants (T32 EY013935 and T32 GM007484), the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Artwork by Antonio Torralba