Seminars & Events

Computing, Environment and Life Sciences
"Visual Computing and Connectomics"

DATE: January 5, 2012
TIME: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
SPEAKER: Hanspeter Pfister, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice at Harvard University
LOCATION: 240 Conference Room 1404-05, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Michael Papka

Description:
Our modern ability to acquire and generate huge amounts of data can potentially enable rapid progress in science and engineering, but we may not live up that promise if our ability to create data outstrips our ability to make sense of that data. In this talk I will present our work on visual computing in Connectomics, a new field in neuroscience that aims to apply biology and computer science to the grand challenge of determining the detailed neural circuitry of the brain. I will give an overview of the computational challenges and describe interactive visualization approaches that we developed to discover and analyze the brain's neural network. The key to our methods is to keep the user in the loop, either for providing input to our downstream reconstruction methods, or for validation and corrections of the reconstructed neural structures. The main challenges we face are how to visualize petabytes of image data in an efficient and scalable way, how to automatically reconstruct very large and dense neural circuits from the nanoscale-resolution electron micrographs, and how to analyze the brain's neural network once we have discovered it.

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