Meeting with Prof. Matthew Turk

On Friday, 1st of December I had a chance to have lunch with Professor Matthew Turk. He is at Computer Science Department of UCSB and the Chair of Media Arts and Technology Program. His research interests include computer vision and imaging, perceptual interfaces, multimodal interaction, human-computer interaction, and gesture recognition. Prof. Turk is also the co-director of UCSB FourEyes Lab, the research focus of which is on the "four I's" of Imaging, Interaction, and Innovative Interfaces.

We discussed among other things Matthew's research on computer vision, their current project, his background in Microsoft Research, and his connections with Finland. Related to his connections with Finland, Dr. Ismo Rakkolainen from Tampere University of Technology has been visiting UCSB and that has lead into a project called
The Interactive FogScreen.

From the point of view of TKK, it was also interesting to notice a project called 3D Hand Pose Reconstruction Using ISOSOM. Based on Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and Tenenbaum's ISOMAP algorithm, Haiying Guan and Matthew Turk have developed the ISOmetric Self-Organizing Mapping algorithm (ISOSOM). Instead of organizing the samples in the 2D grids by Euclidian distance, it utilizes the topological graph and geometric distance of the samples' manifold to define the metric relationships between samples. They report that the experimental results show that the ISOSOM algorithm performs better than traditional image retrieval algorithms for hand pose estimation.