Words were spoken
I had a chance to attend three amazing talks since the last time I posted anything here.
Imaging Network
A new networking group was recently established for the purpose of better collaboration between practicing radiologists, mathematicians, computer scientists and device manufacturers. The inaugural meet was at the the BC Cancer Research Center. I got to meet a lot of interesting people – from chemists (who prepare gels for imaging), people who write monte carlo and motion planning software for needle insertion to mathematicians. From a business perspective, think of this meet as a company going out and finding out what the pain points are in the market.
One of the scientists I was talking to was doing some very interesting work. She was trying to find correlations between thoughts in the mind and deformations/activity in the brain with the use of f-MRI. This could be used for example to find if a person is undergoing depression. That’d be very cool.
Geometric PDEs
Another excellent talk by Dr. Guillermo Sapiro on the use of Geometric Partial Differential Equations in Imaging Science. He used classes of parabolic differential equations for image inpainting. Sapiro has been making waves in the image processing community recently. His work being inter-disciplinary was well attended (lots of people were standing.) I was expecting his talk to be overly technical, but fortunately he only had two equations in his entire presentation.
Something else of interest is that the movie industry spends about 36 man hours per frame for special effects. That’s about 30 frames per second and many thousands of seconds per movie. No wonder guys like George Lucas want to move away from Hollywood:
“We don’t want to make movies. We’re about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we’ve moved away from the feature film thing–it’s too expensive, and it’s too risky,” Lucas told Daily Variety.
The most interesting part of his talk was his 
method
to Djikstra’s algorithm for finding the shortest path. This was
extremely useful for finding distances in the solution to
Hamilton-Jacobi equations. Naïve implementations is of 
order complexity (with the simplifying assumption that
the number of nodes and edges are equal) which can be a significant
deal when N=4000.
Novel Nanotube structures
Another well attended talk by Dr. Meyya Meyyappan, who is the director and senior scientist at Ames Center for Nanotechnology, NASA. His talk was on growing novel one-dimensional structures with carbon nanotubes (CNT). Two main applications I can recall:
- The use of CNTs as a tip in nano-lithography and Scanning Probe Microscopy. Tips are usually made of Silicon Nitride, and this can wear down (reduced resolution) or break. CNTs being stronger than steel is a natural application.
- Growth of vertical transistors instead of horizontal to increase the packing density.
Quite interesting to see where nanotechnology is taking us in the future.