---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Aaron Courville courvila@iro.umontreal.ca Date: Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:51 PM Subject: LISA and DIRO talk: David Stork To: Lisa Labo lisa_labo@iro.umontreal.ca

The "Colloques du DIRO" this week is our visitor, David Stork. He will be visiting all day Thursday, please email me if you are interested in meeting with him.

Cheers, Aaron

Speaker: David G. Stork  (Ricoh Innovations and Stanford University_ Time/Location: 15h30 Thursday Nov 19th / AA6214

Title: Computer vision in the study of art: New rigorous approaches to the study of paintings and drawings

Abstract: New rigorous computer algorithms have been used to shed light on a number of recent controversies in the study of art. For example, illumination estimation and shape-from-shading methods developed for robot vision and digital photograph forensics can reveal the accuracy and the working methods of masters such as Jan van Eyck and Caravaggio. Computer box-counting methods for estimating fractal dimension have been used in authentication studies of paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock. Computer wavelet analysis has been used for attribution of the contributors in Perugino's Holy Family and works of Vincent van Gogh. Computer methods can dewarp the images depicted in convex mirrors depicted in famous paintings such as Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait to reveal new views into artists' studios and shed light on their working methods. New principled, rigorous methods for estimating perspective transformations outperform traditional and ad hoc methods and yield new insights into the working methods of Renaissance masters. Sophisticated computer graphics recreations of tableaus allow us to explore "what if" scenarios, and reveal the lighting and working methods of masters such as Caravaggio.

Biographical sketches: (taken from http://www.diatrope.com/stork/FAQs.html)

(Short) Dr. David G. Stork, Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations, is a graduate in physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. He is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and has published six books/proceedings volumes and has one forthcoming, including Seeing the Light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision and holography (Wiley), Computer image analysis in the study of art (SPIE), Pattern Classification (2nd ed., Wiley), and HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality (MIT).

(Long) Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and has held academic appointments and taught in five departments at Stanford University frequently over the last 20 years. The breadth of his interests and contriburtions is revealed through the academic departments and programs in which he has held faculty positions in leading liberal arts colleges and research universities: Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Computer Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Art and Art History. He is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, "For contributions to pattern recognition education, machine learning, speech recognition, and the application of computer vision to the study of art" and Chair of its Technical Committee on Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage Applications. He has published six books/proceedings volumes and has another in production, including Seeing the Light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision and holography (Wiley), the leading textbook on optics in the arts, Computer image analysis in the study of art (SPIE), the first volume in this discipline, Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art (forthcoming), Pattern Classification (2nd ed., Wiley), the world's all-time best-selling textbook in the field, translated into three languages and used in courses in over 250 universites worldwide, and HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality (MIT), the source of his PBS television documentary 2001: HAL's Legacy. A graduate in physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, he also studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. He has performed research and taught courses such as "Light, color and visual phenomena," "The physics of aesthetics and perception," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and "Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art" over the last quarter century variously at leading liberal arts and research universities such as Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, Clark University, Boston University and Stanford University. He holds 38 US patents and has published numerous technical papers on human and machine learning and perception of patterns, physiological optics, image understanding, concurrency theory, theoretical mechanics, optics, image processing. He has served on the editorial boards of five international journals and has delivered over 58 plenary, invited or distinguished lectures at universities and conferences (atop over 230 traditional invited colloquia and seminars). He was one of four scientists invited to comment on Mr. Hockney's theory at the December 2001 "Art and Optics" Symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities and one of two scientists invited to present a lecture in the symposium exploring the possible use of optics by early Renaissance painters at the Optical Society of America's Annual Meeting in Rochester, NY, October 2004.

-- Aaron C. Courville Département d’Informatique et de recherche opérationnelle Université de Montréal email:Aaron.Courville@gmail.com