W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post Reply
saharss2533
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2012 4:10 pm

W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by saharss2533 » Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:12 pm

Miguel Eckstein Psychological and Brain Science Research Lab

Research Interests: Finding your toothbrush, recognizing a face, or an object all might seem effortless but behind the scenes the brain devotes over 1/4 of its neural machinery to make these complex tasks seem easy. How does the brain do it? Their research uses a wide variety of tools including behavioral psychophysics, eye tracking, electro-encephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational modeling to understand how the brain successfully achieves these everyday perceptual tasks. The investigations involve understanding basic visual perception, eye movements, visual attention, perceptual learning and decision making. They utilize the gained knowledge about how the brain accomplishes every day vision in combination with engineering tools to advance various applied problems: 1) understanding visual, cognitive and decision processes by which doctors detect and classify abnormalities in medical images and developing computer models to improve the way in which we display medical images so that doctors can do fewer errors in clinical diagnosis; 2) develop with engineers bio-inspired computer vision systems; 3) improve the interactions between robots/computer systems and humans.

https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/eckstein/mi ... images.htm

kurt
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:57 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by kurt » Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:23 pm

Some photos I took:
IMG_0047.jpg
IMG_0053.jpg
IMG_0058.jpg
IMG_0060-2.jpg
IMG_0066.jpg
IMG_0067-2.jpg
IMG_0069-2.jpg
IMG_0071.jpg
IMG_0076.jpg
IMG_0078.jpg
IMG_0084.jpg
IMG_0092.jpg
IMG_0096.jpg
IMG_0109.jpg
IMG_0114.jpg
IMG_0116.jpg
Attachments
IMG_0066.jpg

intae
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:56 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by intae » Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:03 am

Visiting The Vision and Image Understanding Lab was interesting experience for me because they are studying how to "see" outside world. Artists always think about this matters, we cannot avoid from this. Maybe Paulo Uccello http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Uccello is the first person who developed line perspective, he strived to paint as same as we see in the actual world. Before Renaissance, most of paintings had a huge gab between scene in a painting and real world, because the artwork served as a religious purpose. Thus, it was totally allowed to exaggerate figures in the painting based the importance of the figure.

Modern artists, not like our ancestor, they had tried to break the rule of 'seeing', one of French artist in 20th c. (personally I don't like that much) Paul Cézanne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne didn't hesitate to distort the form of objects in the painting to make fit into its frame. It is interesting that he was in the same path to the development of photography that capturing the nature as it is.

The way to create art work for the contemporary artists is not that easy that they mentioned, the artist seriously concerns how to show and how the audience make understand the artwork. We build a lot of tricks or a process of understanding. Because appreciating an artwork is closed linked to their memory and experience, it doesn't a simple response of our brain. However, some artists only focused on humans physical or emotional responses, Mark Rothko, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko(it is better to see the paintings) one of expressionist, he drew a emotional movement of the audience confront his huge painting.

About the 16% of weird people, I had some answer. In Asia there is some culture that it is rude to stare elder person's eyes. When I contact their eyes to them, they will understand this as a disobedience. The experiment definitely performed within American person, but I thought that this could be the one of possible answers.

fabian
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:58 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by fabian » Wed Oct 29, 2014 12:35 pm

Thank you for the photos, Kurt!

First, let me point to the fact that again this lab used MatLab as the primary development platform. Sounds like a good tool to learn, see this as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/matlab-s ... le-2014-10. Also, as Sahar remarked during our impromptu meeting down in the uncanny waiting room, there seems to be a lot of overlap with the MAT scope of interests in general.

I thought the fMRI scanning and data visualization part was fascinating, particularly considering that there has to be some kind of "model" brain for the fMRI to be projected onto (I think George mentioned that briefly) to to allow comparison (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_normalization). Somehow it seems to be viable to ignore certain spatial properties of the brain to get to a better working functional description of it. In a way, this is abstraction on an image level, very much like in painting.

saharss2533
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2012 4:10 pm

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by saharss2533 » Thu Oct 30, 2014 9:28 am

I found this lab’s work very fascinating as well. As Fabian mentioned, not only the cognitive science works in this lab are quite related with the research projects we conduct at MAT, but also it gives us a powerful tool for user study in our different artistic and scientific projects. I found it very relevant to my research for studying the impact of my performance practice on the audience members. For instance, there are many hypotheses in performing arts about different applications of digital media in enhancing interacting or creating virtual characters, and their influence on the perception of the audience. Most of the research methodologies to study the impact of these applications are qualitative methods, analyzing the experience using performance and media theory. However eye tracking techniques, FMRI, and different Brain imaging and neural activity evaluation techniques, gives us a much more powerful tool for this kinds of study. Even though they still involved using sensors and different kinds of machinery on the spectators, they are much more accurate and useful than the other quantitative methods, such as questionnaire and interview.

kurt
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:57 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by kurt » Sat Nov 01, 2014 2:11 pm

Professor Eckstein's lab was by far the most artistically conscious so far, as immediately evidenced by the large work of art hanging on the far wall. The unique interior geometry and designer desks were also clues, but Miguel himself has participated in making artwork. He mentioned collaborating on the experimental film "The Din of Celestial Birds" which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnp63TbxXw. This was done as part of a collective called Q6 which describe themselves as practicing "a way of creating in tangible form an alternative approach for exploring the nature of consciousness."

Miguel's personal interests add a little color to his lab's themes of perception and attention. There are definitely some lessons here that would be valuable when applied directly to art. Figuring out natural patterns of decoding visual information is an interesting subject to exploit for the artist and a lucrative opportunity for the spawn of satan, otherwise known as advertising. I would like to see more artwork that capitalizes on Miguel's research. A reversal of this vector gives us additional opportunities- to use very successful artworks as the crux of perceptual studies. Are there any surprising, unforeseen reasons why artworks resonate with certain people and not others ala the outlier 16% in the facial feature attention study? Are there hidden neurological explanations for the effectiveness of widely recognized masterpieces? In what ways does culture influence our perception of art (as Intae mentioned with the Korean tradition of not looking at elder's in the eyes), and how might that change over time?

rluo
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:57 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by rluo » Tue Nov 04, 2014 9:52 am

I totally agreed with Kurt that The Vision and Image Understanding Lab has the most artistic sense among all the lab we’ve visited. Actually, they are doing some artworks. The female graduate student who introduced us the eye tracking system used Unity to develop some 3D scenes, which were implemented into the eye tracking system. I also noticed that another student sitting behind the high round table were making some images for Where Is Mouse via Photoshop.

Obviously, these two students have little background in art or design (I think both of them coming from Physics), but they were self-trained to do some artworks instead of asking some professional artists or designers for help. And it’s very common in many scientific labs that they would just solve artistic issues, like data visualization or video editing, by their own. In new media art world, the boundary between art and science also becomes blurry. Many new media artists have background from mechanical engineering, and coding has already become an essential skill for new media artists. There is an interesting article relating to my thoughts: http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/23/keepi ... media-new/

akshay
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2014 10:55 am

Re: W05V - Prof. Miguel Eckstein Group

Post by akshay » Tue Nov 25, 2014 4:45 am

An interesting thing that I thought about while visiting this lab was that to study the 'pathway' of the eye's point of focus to help understand the way we study medical images, by using medical images: fMRI scans. This feedback loop is very interesting.

A curious impact of eye tracking studies is that they are affecting the practices of commercial graphic design. For example, this study shows that a website's layout design as far as expected positions of things like menus might not disorient users, as long as the website's design is consistent with itself. http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/highe ... y_menu.pdf

This is a much more terse infographic talking about the different parts of good design based on how the eye moves on the page.
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/12/17/eye-tracking-101/

Why I find this particularly interesting is that designers are trained in the aesthetics and functionality of good design. There are plenty of studies showing what color palette best suites the kind of company you are, again based on psychological research. This makes me think, does aesthetics matter if good design, someday, can be completely parameterized?

Post Reply