[talks] /@rts: Tuesday, 2/19 - David Stork - "When Computers Look at Art: Computer Vision and Image Analysis in Humanistic Studies of the Visual Arts"

[Perry R Cook]

Hey all,

Please forward to any friends you might have
that might be interested in art, art history,
art fraud, etc.  David is an old friend and
collaborator, and always gives really entertaining
talks.  For the last couple of years he's been
embroiled in the controversy about whether the
masters used machines and optics to make their
perspective drawings and paintings.

David is the "Stork" in Duda, Hart and Stork,
"Pattern Classification, 2nd edition"

This talk is certain to have lots of computer vision,
machine learning, and art in it.

PRC

2/19 - David Stork -
"When Computers Look at Art: Computer Vision and Image Analysis
   in Humanistic Studies of the Visual Arts"

"When Computers Look at Art: Computer Vision and Image Analysis in Humanistic 
Studies of the Visual Arts"
scientist David Stork -
Tuesday, February 19, 4:30 pm
185 Nassau Street, James Stewart Theater

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.

Bio:

Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Visiting
Scholar at Stanford University, where he has held appointments, taught,
and sat on dissertation committees frequently over the last 17 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 magazine. He has taught courses such as ''Light,
color and visual phenomena,'' ''The physics of aesthetics and
perception,'' and ''Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting'' 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 a member of the International
Foundation for Art Research and co-editor of Computer Image Analysis in
the Study of Art (SPIE 2008), the first symposium volume on the topic.
He holds 35 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 five books, 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 45 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). He was one of four
scientists invited to comment on Mr. Hockney's theory at the December
2001 Art and Optics Symposium at the New York Institute for the
Humanities and one of two scientists invited to present a lecture in the
symposium exploring the possible use of optics by Renaissance painters
at the Optical Society of America's Annual Meeting in Rochester, NY,
October 2004.

URLs:
http://www.diatrope.com/stork/FAQs.html