Whitman Richards

Position: Faculty

Office: 32-364

Phone:253-5776

E-mail: wrichards@csail.mit.edu

Research Directorate(s): AI

URL: http://wrichards.www.media.mit.edu/people/wrichards/

Biography:

Main research focus has been visual perception: mechanisms and models. Beginning first with studies of early visual processing, current work is now at a very high cognitive level, with emphasis on perception as a complex system of semi-autonomous modules -- roughly akin to Minsky's "Society of Mind."

In the mid-seventies, research activity was redirected after meeting David Marr. Rather than concentrating on mechanisms of vision, the emphasis changed to understanding the minimal conditions that should be satisfied for a vision system "to work." Computational studies that met Marr's criteria turned out to be major advances in vision understanding. My contribution, together with those of my students, appears in a book called "Natural Computation", which covers work in vision, hearing, and motor control.

Since the late eighties, we've asked what it means for a machine to perceive. This has led to the study of problems in high level vision and to the question of how perceptual knowledge is represented and structured. One proactical consequence of this work was the invention of a new scaling technique, "Trajectory Mapping", which overcomes some of the limitations of traditional multi-dimensional scaling methods, and allows one to explore the "paths" that link elements in conceptual spaces. These paths seem to reflect a modal character of natural events. Understanding these types of maps has the potential benefit of revealing how cognitive representations may be organized and manipulated, giving us insights into the design of future artifacts and meaningful interfaces between mind, brain, people and machines. These more recent studies have shown the form of knowledge structures is a key to understanding rational behavior in complex, intelligent systems.

Recent and/or Significant Publications:

1. Probability of Collective Choice with Shared Knowledge Structures. W. Richards, B.D.McKay, and D. Richards. Jrl. Math. Psych. 46,338-351,2002.

2. Collective Choice and Mutual Knowledge Structures D. Richards, W. Richards and B.D.McKay. Advances in Complex Systems 1: 1999 . See also Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 98-04-032, 1998.

3. Neural Voting Machines. W. Richards and S. Seung. Proc. Cog. Sci. Soc. Ann. Mtg. 2003

4. Categorical Representation and Recognition of Oscillatory Motion Patterns. J. Davis, A. Bobick, and W. Richards. CVPR 2000

5. Relating Categories of Intentional Animal Motions. J. Davis & W. Richards. Ohio State Univ. Dept. Computer Sci. Tech. Report OSU-11/00-TR25 [2000]

6. Mapping the mental space of rectangles. J. Feldman & W. Richards, Perception 27:1191-1202, 1998.

7. Attentional Frames, Frame Curves and Figural Boundaries: The Inside/Outside Dilemma. J. B. Subirana-Vilanova & W. Richards. Vision Research 36:10 1493-1501, 1996.

8. In Perception as Bayesian Inference Knill, D., & W. Richards (Eds.) Cambridge University Press, 1996. Chpt. 2. "Modal Structure and reliable inference" (with Allan Jepson and David Knill). Chpt. 3, "Priors, preferences and categorical percepts" (with A. Jepson & J. Feldman).

9. Structuring information with mental models: A tour of

Boston. I. Lokuge, S.A. Gilbert, and W. Richards. Proceedings of ACM SIGCHI '96, 1996.

10. Trajectory Mapping (TM): A new non-metric scaling technique (with J.J. Koenderink). Perception, 24:1315-1331, 1995. ; also MIT AI Memo 1468 (1994); also Proc. European Conference on Visual Perception, ECVP '93, Edinburgh, August, 1993.