ImageXD 2023

Confirmed Speakers

Sara Beery will join MIT as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making in EECS in September 2023 and is currently a visiting researcher at Google working on urban tree mapping across North America. She received her PhD in computing and mathematical sciences at Caltech in 2022, where she was advised by Pietro Perona. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with nongovernmental organizations and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide and works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity building and education.

Wei-Lun (Harry) Chao

Wei-Lun (Harry) Chao is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the Ohio State University (OSU). His research interests are in machine learning and its applications to computer vision, autonomous driving, natural language processing, and health care. His recent work focuses on vision recognition in the wild, robust 2D/3D perception, and learning with imperfect data. His research is funded by NSF, ONR, Cisco, AWS, etc. He is a member of the NSF Imageomics Institute and NSF ICICLE Institute. He has published more than 30 peer-review papers in first-tier venues, including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, etc. Prior to joining OSU, he was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science at the University of Southern California in 2018.

Dr. Dan Chitwood

Dan Chitwood is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the Departments of Horticulture and Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering. A plant biologist by training, he studies plant morphology and computational approaches to quantify shape. He uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA), a mathematical field that treats shapes as data (and data as shape), to comprehensively extract shape information from leaf shapes, X-ray Computed Tomography reconstructions, and more abstract data types, like gene expression and protein structure. He has also developed Plants&Python, a free, publicly available, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and multilingual coding resource to bridge computational and plant science research across the US and México.

Kira Evans

Kira is a Napari core developer and a scikit-image contributor with a passion for increasing accessibility to open source software and multi-dimensional image viewing, processing, and analysis tools. She has been dedicated to topics related to fundamentals in program design and machine learning, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and web design. The past 4 years, she has worked as a Software Engineer for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and she has also served on the Scientific Python Ecosystem Coordination steering committee.Kira Evans is a napari core developer and a scikit-image contributor with a passion for increasing accessibility to open source software and tools. She serves on the Scientific Python Ecosystem Coordination steering committee.

Dr. Catherine Nakalembe

Dr. Catherine Nakalembe is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences. Her research focuses on developing remote sensing and machine learning applications for smallholder agriculture, early warning of food insecurity, and disaster assessment in Africa. She is the Africa Program Director for NASA Harvest and a NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences team member. Most recently, she has received the 2022 Highest Civilian Award: The Golden Jubilee Medal-Civilians of Uganda and the 2020 Africa Food Prize for her dedication to improving food security in Africa through the enhanced use of Earth observation.

Dr. Sharmila Majumdar

Sharmila Majumdar is a UCSF Professor and is the Vice Chair for Research and Margaret Hart Surbeck Distinguished Professor in Advanced Imaging in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and joint appointments in Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Orthopedic Surgery at UCSF. She is executive and Scientific Director of the center for Intelligent Imaging, and Director of the Musculoskeletal Research Interest Group at UCSF, an interdisciplinary group consisting of faculty, post-doctoral scholars and students. Her research work on imaging, particularly magnetic resonance and micro computed tomography, and development of image processing and analysis tools, has been focused in the areas of osteoporosis, osteo-arthritis and lower back pain. Her research, which is supported by grants from the NIH and corporate entities, and is diverse ranging from technical development to clinical trials.

Stéfan van der Walt

Stéfan van der Walt is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, the founder of scikit-image, and co-author of "Elegant SciPy: The Art of Scientific Python". Stéfan has been developing scientific open-source software for more than fifteen years, and is a community leader of the Scientific Python project. He serves as a director of NumFOCUS, and on the steering committees of NumPy, SciPy, and the PSF's Scientific Working Group.