NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute (EAPSI) for FY 2013 in China

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This action funds Samuel Fuller Dodge of Arizona State University to conduct a research project in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering area during the summer of 2013 at Peking University in Beijing, China. The project title is "Biologically Inspired Computer Vision: Using Attention to Efficiently Process Visual Entities." The host scientist is Dr. Yizhou Wang.This project studies the usefulness of biologically inspired visual attention models in computer vision applications. The human visual system is able to process a large amount of information using relatively few physiological resources by selectively focusing attention on the most salient areas of a scene. This same manner of information processing can be useful in computer vision systems that are under similar computational constraints. To this aim, this project investigates the relative influence of simple bottom-up attention and more complicated top-down attention for the applications of object recognition and scene understanding. Bottom-up attention is formed from low-level features that attract our attention such as a red dot in a sea of blue dots. Top-down attention stems from higher level cognitive processing, such as detecting a face in the scene. Together these two factors can yield a more appropriate attention model for use in computer vision recognition tasks.Broader impacts of an EAPSI fellowship include providing the Fellow a first-hand research experience outside the U.S.; an introduction to the science, science policy, and scientific infrastructure of the respective location; and an orientation to the society, culture and language. These activities meet the NSF goal to educate for international collaborations early in the career of its scientists, engineers, and educators, thus ensuring a globally aware U.S. scientific workforce. Furthermore, the results of this research will be disseminated in a top computer vision conference, so that this research can find use in practical application areas such as automation, healthcare, and intelligent systems. The fellow is working with Chinese graduate and undergraduate students to improve their professional English, so that they will be more prepared for conferences.