App Stats: Pfister on "Visual Computing in Biology" 

 We hope you can join us this Wednesday, February 29, 2012 for the  Applied Statistics Workshop .  Hanspeter Pfister , Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the  School of Engineering and Applied Sciences  at Harvard University, will give a presentation entitled "Visual Computing in Biology". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. 

 "Visual Computing in Biology" 
Hanspeter Pfister 
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University 
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)  
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 12.00 pm 

 Abstract: 
 Many areas in science are experiencing a flood of data arising in part from the development of instruments that acquire information on an unprecedented scale. This is particularly true in biology, where huge amounts of heterogeneous data are acquired from microarrays, scanners, microscopes, and various other instruments. Visual computing tools are essential to gain insights into this data by combining computational analysis with the power of the human perceptual and cognitive system and enabling data exploration through interactive visualizations. In this talk I will present some of my group's work in visual computing and give an overview of several successful visualization projects in the areas of genomics and systems biology. I then will focus on our work on visual computing in Connectomics, a new field in neuroscience that aims to apply biology and computer science to the grand challenge of determining the detailed neural circuitry of the brain.