We offer our very enthusiastic congratulations to Assistant Professor Vikas Singh for his receipt of a new NSF CAREER Award. The award is a strong recognition of Vikas' accomplishments as an expert in medical image analysis. His project will develop new computer vision methods for representation and analysis of structural and functional neuroimaging data for identifying weak group level differences in the small sample size regime. Potential applications include early diagnosis of neurological disorders as well as evaluating effects of novel interventional procedures.

We are delighted to introduce Sandeep Saha who has just joined our Department as an Assistant Researcer/biostatistician. He will be working with Menggang Yu, KyungMann Kim and the rest of the UWCCC Biostatistics Shared Resource team. He will also be working with Rick Chappell and researchers in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Sandeep recently completed a MS in Biostatistics from Western Michigan University. Previously he received a B.Sc Hons in Biotechnology from the University of Toronto, and a post-graduate diploma in Clinical Research. His work experience includes work as a clinical research coordinator for industry studies, including investigator driven trials. Sandeep is a wonderful addition to our Biostatistics group and we are thrilled that he is here. [27 March 2013]

Professor KyungMann Kim is President-elect of the Society for Clinical Trials (SCT), effective May 2013. The Society for Clinical Trials "was created in 1978 and is an international professional organization dedicated to the development and dissemination of knowledge about the design, conduct and analysis of government and industry-sponsored clinical trials and related health care research methodologies." We would like to congratulate KyungMann and thank him for his service in this role!
[SCT brochure, SCT Brochure.pdf, 14 March 2013]

Congratulations to Associate Professor Moo Chung on his upcoming appointment as a University Vilas Associate, beginning in Summer, 2013. This appointment, with its associated funding stream, will allow him to pursue his research on hidden topological structures in medical imaging data and their links to computational efficiency. His work will also pursue exploitation of such "hidden topology" to achieve greater discriminating power between distinct images. [28 Jan 2013]

Professor Dave DeMets was recently chosen as Chair-Elect of the Section on Statistics of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS "is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide".  [ AAAS webpage, 16 Jan 2013]

We offer hearty congratulations to Professor KyungMann Kim who was elected as a Fellow in the Section on Statistics of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. KyungMann was elected in recognition of his statistical methodology and collaborative research, his leadership, and his service to the profession. KyungMann has conducted ground-breaking methodology work in sequential analysis as applied to interim monitoring of ongoing trials, a critical area for modern cancer and other clinical trials. He has also ably served as Director of the UWCCC Biostatistics Shared Resource for over 15 years. However, his biostatistical contributions and leadership go far beyond the boundaries of UW, extending especially to cancer research on the "Asian rim", where he has participated in clinical research and teaching in a variety of capacities.

KyungMann is a role model for younger faculty on how to make an impact in research through his scholarship, his leadership and his service. We are proud to have him as a key faculty member in the Department. The AAAS Fellows election was held in October 2012 by the AAAS Council and the results were made public Friday. All new Fellows will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2013 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

A full list of new Fellows is available here: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/1130fellows_2012.shtml 
[03 Dec 2012]

Assistant Professor Vikas Singh and his laboratory recently created an interactive, tablet computer-based demonstration for grade school children (of all ages!) at the Wisconsin Science Festival. Their exploration station, entitled "Interactive Parsing or Segmentation of Large Sets of Images" was extremely well-received.

"What does the world look like to a machine?"	"Hands-on experience with a demonstration of human-guided cosegmentation software, learn more about how, exactly, a computer sees your photos."

"Screenshot of Computer Vision Application."

The human brain understands instinctively how to look at an image and see how it breaks up into different objects, but even after three decades of research, computers find this extremely hard. A recent thrust of research helps computers learn to do this task by looking at groups of related images, a technique called "cosegmentation".

A special thanks to Professor Singh's student, Maxwell Collins, who spent a great deal of time and effort working on the development of the android application. Read more on the story of Vikas' research on computer vision posted on the SMPH
website at: Researchers Trying to Get Computers to See as Humans Do  [30 Nov 2012]

Read more Department News items archived here... http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/News/archivenews.htm