Research

I am a former member of the Image & Video Computing Group at Boston University, where I worked with Margrit Betke to develop novel microorganism tracking systems. I also performed Natural Language Processing research under Andrei Lapets and Assaf Kfoury.

Computer Vision Research - Cell Tracking

My cell tracking research was funded by five Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program grants, issued consecutively from May 2008 to January 2010. My original UROP proposal was to develop a fully-automated computer vision-based microorganism tracking system for use in cell migration studies at BU; since the completion of this system in Fall 2008, the cell tracking project has focused on using behavioral reasoning and cell state analysis to develop a new, vectorial-based model of cellular migration.

This project has made contributions to both the computer science and biomedical fields: I first introduced the specific methodology of my system in the Annual Proceedings of the Biophysical Society in February 2009, and later published new computer vision-based migratory metrics in a paper presented at the IEEE Society's CVPR Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis on June 5 2009 in Miami, Florida.

This project has bolstered computer science research at Boston University by acting as a cornerstone feasibility study into the modeling of group behavior, leading to the award of a $2.8 million USD National Science Foundation Grant to study and track group behavior at the computer science department at Boston University.

My cell tracking project sees continued success in providing tools that accelerate cell migration research at Boston University. The project is maintained as "BU MicroSight."

Publications

D House, ML Walker, Z Wu, JY Wong & M Betke. 2009. Tracking of cell populations to understand their spatio-temporal behavior in response to physical stimuli. In MMBIA: IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis, Miami, FL, June 2009. Video, Paper.

ML Walker, D House, M Betke & JY Wong. Using Automated Cell Tracking Tools to Quantify Durokinesis and Durotaxis in Real Time. In Proceedings of the 53rd Meeting of the Biophysical Society, Feb. 2009.

My full publication list is available on my CV.

Presentations

Boston University's 2009 Undergraduate Research Symposium -- October 2009, Boston, MA^**
Boston Undergraduate Research Symposium (BURS) -- April 2009, Boston, MA^*
New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium 2009 (NEUCS) -- April 2009, Boston, MA^*
Biophysical Society's 53rd Annual Meeting -- February 2009, Boston, MA^**
Boston University's 2008 Undergraduate Research Symposium -- October 2008, Boston, MA^*

*   denotes Plenary Talk
** denotes Poster Presentation

In the Media

"Computing Solutions." Arts & Sciences Magazine November 2009: p 9. Link.
"Opportunity Awaits: Undergraduate Research." Research at Boston University Sept. 2009: p 48.

Grants

NSF Grant #0910908 - HCC: Large: Intelligent Tracking Systems that Reason about Group Behavior. Award, webpage.