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When computers look at art: Image analysis in humanistic studies of the visual arts12:00 noon, May 05, Monday, 2008, Johnson Center Gold Room Speaker David G. Stork Abstract New computer methods have been used to shed light on a number of recent controversies in the study of art. For example, computer fractal analysis has been used in authentication studies of paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock recently discovered by Alex Matter. Computer wavelet analysis has been used for attribution of the contributors in Perugino's Holy Family. An international group of computer and image scientists is studying the brushstrokes in paintings by van Gogh for detecting forgeries. Sophisticated computer analysis of perspective, shading, color and form has shed light on David Hockney's bold claim that as early as 1420, Renaissance artists employed optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images onto their canvases.  How do these computer methods work? What can computers reveal about images that even the best-trained connoisseurs, art historians and artist cannot? How much more powerful and revealing will these methods become? In short, how is computer image analysis changing our understanding of art? This profusely illustrate lecture for non-scientists will include works by Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Lorenzo Lotto, and others. You may never see paintings the same way again. Joint work with Antonio Criminisi, Andrey DelPozo, David Donoho, Marco Duarte, Micah Johnson, Dirk Robinson, Silvio Savarese, Morteza Shahram, Ron Spronk, Christopher W. Tyler and Yasuo Furuichi Short Bio Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Consulting Professor of Statistics and Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at Stanford University, where he has held appointments, taught, and sat on dissertation committees frequently over the last 18 years in the departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Psychology and Art and Art History. He has published in optics and art for over two decades, including Seeing the Light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision and holography (Wiley), the leading textbook on optics in the arts. A graduate in physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, he also studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. His anamorphic photographs and graphics (based on late Renaissance methods) have appeared in small art journals as well as Optics and Photonics News and Scientific American. He has taught courses such as "Light, color and visual phenomena," "The physics of aesthetics and perception," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and "Computer vision and image analysis in the study of art," over the last quarter century variously at leading liberal arts and research universities such as Wellesley College, Swarthmore College, Clark University and Stanford University. He is co-editor of Computer image analysis in the study of art (SPIE 2008), the first symposium volume on the topic. He holds 37 US patents and has published numerous technical papers on human and machine learning and perception of patterns, physiological optics, image understanding, concurrency theory, theoretical mechanics, optics, image processing, as well as six books and proceedings volumes, including Pattern Classification (2nd ed.), the world's all-time best-selling textbook in the field, translated into three languages and used in courses in over 250 universities worldwide. He has served on the editorial boards of five international journals and has delivered over 54 plenary, invited or distinguished lectures at universities and conferences (atop nearly 200 traditional invited colloquia and seminars). He created the PBS television documentary 2001: HAL's Legacy, based on his book HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality (MIT). Related Link |