Dr. Ruth Rosenholtz (MIT): “Human vision at a glance”

Speaker: Dr. Ruth Rosenholtz (MIT) 

Title: Human vision at a glance

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Abstract: Recent advances in human vision research have pointed toward a theory that unifies many aspects of vision that are relevant to applications. According to this theory, loss of information in peripheral vision determines performance on many visual tasks. This theory subsumes old concepts such as visual saliency, selective attention, and change blindness. It predicts the rich details we have access to at a glance. Furthermore, it provides insight into tasks not commonly studied in human vision, such as the ability to comprehend connections in a graph, or to compare information across space.

Bio: Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of CSAIL. She has a Ph.D. in EECS (Computer Vision) from UC Berkeley. She joined MIT in 2003 after 7 years at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC). Her work focuses on developing predictive models of human visual processing, including visual search, perceptual organization, visual clutter, and peripheral vision. In addition, her lab works on applying understanding of human vision to image fidelity (NASA Ames), and to design of user interfaces and information visualizations (Xerox PARC and MIT). She is a world expert in peripheral vision and its implications for how we think about vision, attention, and design.