Scalable Scientific Image Informatics

Abstract:

Recent advances in microscopy imaging, image processing and computing technologies enable large scale scientific experiments that generate not only large collections of images and video, but also pose new computing and information processing challenges. These include providing ubiquitous access to images, videos and metadata resources; creating easily accessible image and video analysis, visualizations and workflows; and publishing both data and analysis resources. Further, contextual metadata, such as experimental conditions in biology, are critical for quantitative analysis. Streamlining collaborative efforts across distributed research teams with online virtual environments will improve scientific productivity, enhance understanding of complex phenomena and allow a growing number of researchers to quantify conditions based on image evidence that so far have remained subjective. This talk will focus on recent work in my group on image segmentation and quantification, followed by a detailed description of the BisQue platform. BisQue (Bio-Image Semantic Query and Environment) is an open-source platform for integrating image collections, metadata, analysis, visualization and database methods for querying and search. We have developed new techniques for managing user-defined datamodels for biological datasets, including experimental protocols, images, and analysis. BisQue is currently used in many laboratories around the world and is integrated into the iPlant cyber-infrastructure (see http://www.iplantcollaborative.org) which serves the plant biology community. For more information on BisQue see http://www.bioimage.ucsb.edu.

Brief Bio:

B. S. Manjunath received the B.E. degree (with distinction) in electronics from Bangalore University, Bangalore, India, in 1985, the M.E. degree (with distinction) in systems science and automation from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1991. He is a Professor of electrical and computer engineering, Director of the Center for Bio-Image Informatics, and Director of the newly established Center on Multimodal Big Data Science and Healthcare at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research interests include image processing, distributed processing in camera networks, data hiding, multimedia databases, and Bio-image informatics. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and is a co-editor of the book Introduction to MPEG-7 (Wiley, 2002). He was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Multimedia, Information Forensics, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and is currently an AE for the BMC Bio Informatics Journal. He is a co-author of the paper that won the 2013 Transactions on Multimedia best paper award and is a fellow of the IEEE.