Two Lectures by

Prof. Debasis Mitra

The Florida Institute of Technology

Lecture #1

Data to Knowledge: Understanding Dynamic Medical Images

Tuesday June 14th @ 11:30

Technion - Meyer Building, Room 1061

ABSTRACT

Computer Science (CS) is the new language of science as Mathematics was until the Twentieth Century. CS generalizes mathematics toward being more versatile. In this talk we will focus on some problems in bio-medical imaging science and discuss and how we try to address them. Tomography is the technology of combining data from multiple views (say, 2D camera snapshots) to create a comprehensive image (say, in 3D). In medicine tomography is used to gather knowledge about target organs or physiology inside patients without any probing surgery. In vivo molecular imaging, or gene expression analysis in real time, is a promised goal of functional imaging that targets bio-molecular process. However, it involves time-varying signals coming from inside the body. My talk is on some of the projects on nuclear imaging and fluorescent imaging data with different types of dynamics involved.

Lecture #2

Spatio-temporal Relational Constraint Calculi

Wednesday June 15th @ 14:15

Univ. of Haifa - Jacobs Building, Room 303

ABSTRACT

It all began within the Natural Language Processing. We often use temporal expression like, "Maurya dynasty in India was before or overlapped the period of Qin Dynasty in China." Only qualitative relation, no numbers, are involved, and the relation is disjunctive: “before or overlapped”. Take another example, “Heart is located above and left of liver.” Formalizing such notions over both space and time led to a set of beautiful Spatio-temporal Qualitative Calculii. A few operators involved in reasoning with such qualitative spatio-temporal relations generated a class of relational algebras. In this talk I will briefly introduce some of these algebras and delve into a few projects that we have had an opportunity to contribute. I will also briefly raise some questions for future and mention some possibilities on how to utilize these results.

Biography of the Speaker

DEBASIS MITRA is currently a Professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Prof. Mitra is a Physicist and Computer Scientist. His PhD in Physics is from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and in Computer Science is from Center for Advanced Computer Studies at University of Louisiana. A central theme of Mitra's present research is to elicit knowledge nuggets from noisy spatio-temporal data, especially from Bio-medical images. One of these efforts is dedicated to improving reconstruction of Nuclear Medical images of heart and brain. A long term vision is to understand the molecular biology of diseases for improving human health. In the past Mitra has made contributions in artificial intelligence studying the qualitative reasoning problems with spatial and temporal constraints.