Thursday, December 10, 2009

USA yesterday, France today, India tomorrow

When I board the plane for India next week, and hopefully before I grow web feet, it will be the third country and continent I will have visited in less than a month. This itinerant researcher travels easily in time and space and culture only because I take my internet bubble with me everywhere. I am so completely entertained and enthralled by Kishore's hijinks, I could be anywhere and want for nothing.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

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.