Biography

Jochen Triesch received his Diploma and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Bochum, Germany, in 1994 and 1999, respectively. After two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Computer Science Department of the University of Rochester, USA, he joined the faculty of the Cognitive Science Department of UC San Diego, USA as an Assistant Professor. In 2005 he became a Fellow of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Since 2007 he is the Johanna Quandt Research Professor for Theoretical Life Sciences at FIAS. He also holds professorships at the Department of Physics and the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2006 he received a Marie Curie Excellence Center Award of the European Union. His research interests span Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, and Developmental Robotics.

Abstract

Tentative title: Efficient coding in vision: from robots to patients

Biological vision systems learn to perceive their environment largely autonomously, through interacting with it. How does this work? I will review recent work on building vision systems that autonomously learn a range of active vision skills based on principles of efficient coding. Interestingly, these systems reach sub-pixel accuracy without any supervision or kinematic model. At the same time, they are robust to various perturbations. Their behavior and learned representations mimic biological findings. Finally, I discuss how these models can also help us to better understand developmental disorders of vision in human patients.