AI for Identity & Health

When: Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Ioannis Kakadiaris, University of Houston

Host: Dr. Thamar Solorio

Research in the Computational Biomedicine Laboratory is motivated by fundamental open problems in computer vision, image analysis, AI (machine learning/deep learning), with an emphasis on applications that address some of society's greatest challenges. The lab fosters innovative collaborations with other institutions, creates transferable technology, and disseminates results to scientific and medical communities and the general public. The Biometrics cluster of CBL examines research problems in the areas of face recognition, facial expression analysis and visual question answering in videos. The Biomedical Computing Cluster examines research problems arising in health and healthcare. For example, we seek to develop a new scoring paradigm that will capture the individuals that are risk of having a heart attack in the next 12 months. The presentation will highlight the state-of-the-art win these fields, highlight our contributions to the field and point towards exciting research challenges and outstanding research topics.

Bio:

Ioannis A. Kakadiaris is a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston (UH). He joined UH in August 1997 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Ioannis earned his B.Sc. in physics at the University of Athens in Greece, his M.Sc. in computer science from Northeastern University, and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the founder of the Computational Biomedicine Laboratory and in 2008 he directed the Methodist-University of Houston-Weill Cornell Medical College Institute for Biomedical Imaging Sciences. Professor Kakadiaris founded and served as the Director of the Borders, Trade, and Immigration Institute, a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence led by the University of Houston. As director for BTI Institute, Ioannis oversaw multiple projects, undertaken with seventeen partners across nine states, which provided homeland security enterprise education and workforce development and which studied complex, multi-disciplinary issues related to flows of people, goods, and data across borders. Kakadiaris is also the co-founder of the Pumps and Pipes initiative which examines the cross -domain innovation in the domains of medicine, oil industry and aerospace. His research interests include computer vision, image analysis, machine learning and deep learning. In addition to twice winning the UH Computer Science Research Excellence Award, Ioannis has been recognized for his work with several distinguished honors, including the NSF Early Career Development Award, the Schlumberger Technical Foundation Award, the UH Enron Teaching Excellence Award, and the James Muller Vulnerable Plaque Young Investigator Prize. His research has been featured on Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, KPRC NBC News, KTRH ABC News, and KHOU CBS News.