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Vision: Challenges and Prospects

Pawan Sinha SM '92, PhD '95: June 13, 2003; Running Time: 1:01:26

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In a fraction of a second, most of us can recognize a face in a crowd, or make out a face from a blurry image. Pawan Sinha focuses on our uncanny ability to recognize faces as a way of getting at one of the key problems of neuroscience: how our brains represent and then encode objects. He theorizes that facial perception is a holistic process: we broadly take in the relationship, for instance, of eyes, nose and mouth. He tested this hypothesis by creating a computer program that could similarly grasp facial structure, and the program was able to “see” a face within a larger picture. In his Hirschfeld Project, Sinha is trying to distill the caricaturists’ understanding about the important landmarks of a face. He’s discovered that you can shrink an image of a face to 13% horizontally or vertically, and it will still be recognizable. Sinha’s work on how the brain perceives faces has immediate application in security surveillance systems, pedestrian-alert systems for cars, and in robotics. But closest to Sinha’s heart is a new project in India, home to 30% of the world’s blind, where he will assist and study children with recovered sight following congenital blindness.

Lecture Details

Location: 3-170

About the Speaker

Pawan Sinha SM '92, PhD '95

Associate Professor of Computational Science, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Pawan Sinha has earned a variety of academic and industry honors, including the 2007 Troland Research Award, the AT&T Research Award, the NEC Research Award and the first prize in MIT’s 1997 Entrepreneurial Competition.

He received a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and then came to MIT for his M.S., Ph.D., and post-doctoral training. He served as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He joined MIT in 1999. Sinha is an inventor, and an accomplished cartoonist, who penned an award-winning comic strip called "Tumbleweed Garden" for the MIT student newspaper.