Professor Inauguration: Jon Sporring

From pixels to knowledge - Registering the big picture in data science

Jon Sporring has been appointed professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (DIKU). The appointment will be marked by an inaugural lecture on 19 December 2018 at 2 p.m.

Program:

14.00 - 15.00: Inaugural Lecture: From pixels to knowledge - Registering the big picture in data science

Abstract: Modern imaging devices such as microscopes and synchrotrons provide data which are often too big and too complex for humans to analyse efficiently, and often we must rely on computer programs to extract knowledge from data.

Developing programs to analyse images give us novel, objective, and reproducible insights into images, which for some tasks are difficult to match by humans. For other tasks, it is a real challenge to develop versatile programs, and human interpretations are to be preferred.

Microscope images are of particular interest to me since an increasing number of different microscope techniques are being developed which produce views of structures at subcellular level at an unprecedented resolution and in increasing data quantities.

Further, since the images vary greatly in appearance and quality, techniques from computer vision and medical image processing are only partially applicable. Often improvements of existing or invention of new algorithms are required, which I find a great source of inspiration.

In this talk, I demonstrate how image analysis is used for statistical models of ultrastructures in nerve cells and I will give examples of how we have improved existing and developed new algorithms for image analysis.

15.00 - 15.15 Short break

15.15 - 17.00 Reception in the Canteen Area of the HCØ Building

Bio

Jon Sporring received his Master and PhD degree from DIKU in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Part of his PhD program was carried out at IBM Research Center, Almaden, California, USA.

Following his PhD, he worked as a visiting researcher at the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab at Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas, Greece, and as assistant research professor at 3D-Lab, School of Dentistry, University of Copenhagen. In 2003, he started at DIKU. From 2008-2009 he was part-time Senior Researcher at Nordic Bioscience a/s. In the period 2012-2013 he was a visiting professor at School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Jon Sporring also co-founded DigiCorpus Aps in 2012 and served as Chief research officer of the company from 2012-2016 developing computer vision based systems for automatic feedback for physiotherapeutic rehabilitation.

Today, Jon is affiliated to the Section for Image Analysis, computational modeling, and geometry at DIKU