Bio-Image Informatics Workshop, Santa Barbara, Jan 17-18.
These are the highlights and random thoughts.
- Santa Barbara: ocean on one side, mountains on the other, and 65 degrees! In 3 days I didn’t see a single cloud. The sky was so blue that it looked photoshopped.
- The workshop was very well organized. The only problem I had was that you didn’t get a break after every talk. You need 5 minutes to digest, recharge, discuss the talk with your neighbor, or just stretch your legs.
- The talks were mostly academic (zebra fish is pretty much covered). But 3-4 talks were excellently presented and very educational.
- This biology stuff is complicated!
- Most image analysis methods are intended for specific problems. But, in addition, each problem may have different methods eqully applicable. No-one is concerned that the results could be also different (see last post).
- The Open Microscopy Environment could have a good future.
- One non-academic talk was by a person from Definiens. Unfortunately only generalities were presented followed by a few examples. Secretive. A top-down approach isn’t a good idea anyway.
- Dr. Pahwa and I had a few good discussions about cellAnalyst with several people. More in a couple of days.
- You get 65 degrees only for a few hours in the afternoon. When you get out in the morning, it’s more like 40 or less.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:38 am
I think you’re right in making such a consideration. But the hope for generality is a common sense in every science that could be someway related to human being: just imagine AI, for a simple example, where we can identify a bunch of simple and singular difficult problems (taxonomy, elastic matching, contextualizing and de-contextualizing, language deformation and so on…) but AI researchers are still working to *global conscience* or *digital conscience* projects…
I’m involved in Computer Vision research (mostly for industrial quality control) and also I teach Robotics/CV @ University, and the first thing I say when I start the first lesson to the class is: “PLEASE, forget to be human! When you think about your eyes, your mind and your capability to solve a problem, PLEASE, just take examples, not rules. Human capabilities to go deep in a problem and subdivide it in simpler task is a thing we haven’t still realized in silicon, so PLEASE, keep it simple and stupid!”.
I wish someone had listened to my words…at least once!
Compliments for your blog and other activities, I’ll follow your news more often. Bye.