KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Heidi Latsky
Heidi Latsky’s thirty-five-year dance career began in Canada, continued with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and culminated in 2001 when she founded Heidi Latsky Dance. A critically acclaimed, innovative, and influential leader in the physically integrated dance field, Latsky has toured internationally and presented at institutions such as American Dance Festival, Cooper Hewitt, the High Line, ICA Boston, Joyce Theater, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Whitney Museum. The company was featured at Lincoln Center’s 75th Anniversary of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Latsky’s keynote speeches have impacted audiences at APAP, Arts for All Abilities, Barnard College, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Harvard University, and the Maxine Green Institute. She has presented at TEDxWOMEN and a feature on her work, GIMP (2008), was nominated for an Emmy.
Latsky’s ventures into technology and fashion have resulted in partnerships with the Fashion Institute of Technology, Google’s Creative Lab, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, NuVu Design Studios, and Positive Exposure. She has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative Capital, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and NYSCA, among others.
Latsky’s film Soliloquy has screened worldwide, and her live sculpture ON DISPLAY created for the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act is now a global phenomenon, performed annually on the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities, at over seventy sites. Latsky continues to disrupt space, dismantle the meaning of normal, and redefine beauty.
Dr. GIL Weinberg
Gil Weinberg is a Professor and The Founding Director of Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Robotic Musicianship group. His research focuses on developing artificial creativity and musical expression for robots and augmented humans. Among his projects are a marimba playing robotic musician called Shimon that uses machine learning for composition, improvisation, and interaction, and a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human musical abilities.
Weinberg has presented his work worldwide in venues such as the United Nations, The Kennedy Center, The World Economic Forum, Ars Electronica, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, SIGGRAPH, and TED among others. His music has been performed with orchestras such as Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the National Irish Symphony Orchestra, and the Scottish BBC Symphony, while his research has been disseminated through articles and patents in the field of human-robot-interaction and music technology. Weinberg received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and his B.A. from the interdisciplinary program for fostering excellence in Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Dimitris Metaxas
Dr. Dimitris Metaxas is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University since July 2007. From September 2001 to June 2007 he was a Professor in the same department. He is currently directing the Center for Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling (CBIM). From January 1998 to September 2001 he was a tenured Associate Professor in the Computer and Information Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the VAST Lab. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor in the same department since 1992. Prof. Metaxas received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens of Athens Greece in 1986, an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1992.
Dr. Metaxas has been conducting research towards the development of formal methods upon which both computer vision, computer graphics and medical imaging can advance synergistically. In computer vision, he works on the simultaneous segmentation and fitting of complex objects, shape representation, statistical model-based tracking, learning, sparsity, ASL and gesture recognition. In particular he is focusing on human body and shape motion analysis, human surveillance, security applications, ASL recognition, behavior modeling and analysis and scalable solutions to large and distributed sensor-based networks. In the area of biomedical applications new methods have been developed for material modeling and shape estimation of internal body parts (e.g., lungs) from MRI, SPAMM and CT data, a pioneering framework for linking the anatomical and physiological models of the human body and deformable models suitable for the automatic diagnosis of heart illness from MRI data. In computer graphics, he introduced the Navier-Stokes methodology for Fluids, based on which the water scenes in the movie ''Antz'' were created in 1998. For this work, his student Nick Foster won a Technical Achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999. Since then, he is working on new techniques for modeling fluid phenomena, and control theoretic techniques for automating and improving the animation of articulated (e.g., humans) objects. Dr. Metaxas has published over 500 research articles (see google scholar) in these areas and has graduated 42 PhD students. The above research has been funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, AFOSR, DHS, DARPA and the ARO.
Dr. Metaxas has published a book on his research activities titled ''Physics-based deformable models: Applications to computer vision, graphics and medical imaging'' published by Kluwer Academic. He organized the first IEEE Workshop on Physics-Based Modeling in Computer Vision, he is on the Editorial Board of Medical Imaging, as Associate Editor of GMOD, and CAD and is a Co-Editor of the Special Issue of Computer Vision and Image Understanding on Physics-Based Modeling and Reasoning. Dr. Metaxas has received 7 patents and numerous best paper awards for his work on vision, medical imaging and fluid modeling. His student Junzhou Huang won a Young Scientist Award (best paper award) for his work on sparsity from MICCAI 2010 and his recent work on Histopathologic Image Analysis by his student Menglin Jiang and Shaoting Zhang won a best paper award at MICCAI 2015. Dr Metaxas was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1986, is a recipient of an NSF Research Initiation and Career awards, an ONR YIP, is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, and a member of ACM. He was also the Program Chair of ICCV 2007 (best Computer Vision Conference), a General Chair of ICCV 2011, and CVPR 2014, the General Chair of MICCAI 2008 (best Medical Imaging Conference) and the Senior Program Chair for SCA 2007. He has also organized numerous workshops in his areas or research.