Jonathan R. W.

Background

About Jonathan R. W.

I will be joining Systems Technology & Research in April, 2019. WHAT DRIVES MEMy love for visual perception really started while working at the Visual Perception Group atGeneral Dynamics Robotic Systems. It is here that I really gained a real appreciation for thedifficulty of the visual perception tasks that we, as visual animals, find so easy, includingtracking moving targets, image segmentation, object classification, and pedestrian detection. TRANSITION TO ACADEMYWhile wrapping up my part-time Masters in Computer Science in the Machine Learning trackwith Columbia University, I decided to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience in order to understand ourvisual system and how we are able to achieve the awesome feat of visual perception soeffortlessly. I left General Dynamics Robotic Systems to pursue this goal.Under the guidance of Dr. Rüdiger von der Heydt, I designed, ran, and analyzed experimentsthat showed that the primate visual area V2 starts grouping visual elements into objects innatural scenes as soon as 70 ms after the onset of the visual display. This is surprising becauseshape selectivity doesn't appear until 130 ms in posterior IT and V2 is thought to code for morelocal features. NOW AND THE FUTUREI am now a post-doctoral research fellow in Pieter Roelfsema's Vision and Cognition lab at theNetherlands Institute for Neuroscience, where I am working on biologically realistic deeplearning models for segmentation and continuing to study perceptual grouping mechanisms, mainly using functional MRI.I will be joining the Video and Image Understanding group of Systems and Technology Research in April, 2018.