USA yesterday, France today

The interlude is now over and I am back to overcast Rennes. A world away in the Florida bible belt, Anuj Srivastava is doing very interesting work with Riemannian shape spaces and one of its applications is to DTI white matter fibers. In working with anatomical brain data sets, I have found that for successful classification, we need to use a combination of physical features. So although Dr Srivastava's primary interest is in shape spaces, some of our work in the last year has been to define joint manifolds which can be used for a variety of classification tasks--clustering, labeling, atlas building and quantitative analysis for differential diagnosis. These manifolds may be extended to enable joint analysis that uses not just physical features but also scalar functions.