Vision researchers from around the world visited York University June 10 to 13 for the Centre for Vision Research (CVR) and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) International Conference on Predictive Vision and shared interdisciplinary research from behavioural, computational and neuroscience perspectives.
The conference, held every two years, provides researchers in vision science an opportunity to collaborate and share knowledge. CVR and VISTA are leaders in human and machine vision research in Canada, and their interdisciplinary approach aims to produce technologies that will help people live healthier, safer and more productive lives.
“The topic of predictive vision was selected as embracing, and being consequential to, virtually all approaches to vision,” said York University Professor Laurence Harris, director of CVR.
York professors Doug Crawford, Mazyar Fallah, John Tsotsos and Joel Zylberberg were speakers at the event. Other presenters came from across Canada as well as the U.S., Germany and England.
Jim DiCarlo from MIT presented the keynote lecture
The closing keynote lecture was delivered by Jim DiCarlo, professor of neuroscience and head of the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
DiCarlo’s talk focused on visual object categorization and detection, and he discussed how work in brain science, cognitive science and computer science converge to create deep neural networks that can support such tasks.
The event had 265 attendees and included more than 20 interdisciplinary presentations, and 92 trainee and researcher posters. There was also a Predictive Vision Philosophy satellite workshop held on June 9.
A poster session during the event
The poster awards were sponsored by Facebook Reality Labs (Human Vision) and MDA (Computer Vision), with first place (Computer Vision) going to Calden Wloka of York University and second place (Computer Vision) going to Saeed Ghorbani of York University. In the category of Human Vision, first place was awarded to Yaseen Jamal of Emory University and second place to Kris Ehinger of York University. The prizes ($300 for first place and $200 for second place) were presented by Piotr Jasiobedzki, product development manager, MDA, and Kevin MacKenzie, research science manager, Facebook Reality Labs.
The conference had 10 sponsors, including VISTA industry partners Qualcomm, Facebook Reality Labs, MDA and Next Canada, and was supported by a team of 12 graduate student volunteers.
About CVR and VISTA
The Centre for Vision Research is a world-renowned research unit combining biological and computational vision research at York University.
Vision: Science to Applications is a research funding program offering scholarships, prototyping awards and research grants to make York University No. 1 in the world for vision science.