Speaker: Alfred Hero, University of Michigan

Title: Continuum limits of minimal graphics

Abstract:
Many applications involve computing minimal graphs over the nodes of a graph relative to a measure of pairwise node dissimilarity. These include minimal spanning trees in computer vision, shortest paths in image databases, or non-dominated anti-chains in multi-objective database search. When the nodes are random vectors and the dissimilarity is an increasing function of Euclidean distance these minimal graphs can have continuum limits as the number of nodes approaches infinity. Such continuum limits can lead to low complexity diffusion approximations to the solution of combinatorial  problems. 

Bio:
Alfred O. Hero III received the B.S. (summa cum laude) from Boston University (1980) and the Ph.D from Princeton University (1984), both in Electrical Engineering. Since 1984 he has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering. He is also the Co-Director of the University's Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) . At the University of Michigan his primary appointment is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and he also has appointments, by courtesy, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics. From 2008 to 2013 he held the Digiteo Chaire d'Excellence, sponsored by Digiteo Research Park in Paris, located at the Ecole Superieure d'Electricite, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. He has held other visiting positions at LIDS Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), Boston University (2006), I3S University of Nice, Sophia-Antipolis, France (2001), Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure de Lyon (1999), Ecole Nationale Sup\'erieure des T\'el\'ecommunications, Paris (1999), Lucent Bell Laboratories (1999), Scientific Research Labs of the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Michigan (1993), Ecole Nationale Superieure des Techniques Avancees (ENSTA), Ecole Superieure d'Electricite, Paris (1990), and M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory (1987 - 1989).

Alfred Hero has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (1995-1998, 1999), the IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2004-2006), and the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2002, 2004). He was Chairman of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing (SSAP) Technical Committee (1997-1998) and Treasurer of the Conference Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was Chairman for Publicity of the 1986 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (Ann Arbor, MI) and General Chairman of the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (Detroit, MI). He was co-chair of the 1999 IEEE Information Theory Workshop on Detection, Estimation, Classification and Filtering (Santa Fe, NM) and the 1999 IEEE Workshop on Higher Order Statistics (Caesaria, Israel). He was general chair of the 2012 IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing (Ann Arbor, MI). He co-chaired the 2002 Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics (GENSIPS). He was Vice President (Finance) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (1999-2002). He was Chair of Commission C (Signals and Systems) of the US National Commission of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) (1999-2002). He was member of the Signal Processing Theory and Methods(SPTM) Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (1999-2004). He was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-2007) and during his term he served on the TAB Periodicals Committee (2006) and the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB). He was a member of the IEEE TAB Society Review Committee (2009), the IEEE Awards Committee (2010-2011), and served on the Board of Directors of the IEEE (2009-2011) as Director of Division IX (Signals and Applications). He served on the IEEE TAB Nominations and Appointments Committee (2012-2014). Alfred Hero is currently a member of the Big Data Special Interest Group (SIG) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Since 2011 he has been a member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the US National Academies of Science.

Alfred Hero is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of Tau Beta Pi, the American Statistical Association (ASA) , the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the US National Commission (Commission C) of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). He received the University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award (2011). He has been plenary and keynote speaker at several workshops and conferences. He has received several best paper awards including: an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (1998), a Best Original Paper Award from the Journal of Flow Cytometry (2008), a Best Magazine Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2010), a SPIE Best Student Paper Award (2011), an IEEE ICASSP Best Student Paper Award (2011), an AISTATS Notable Paper Award (2013), and an IEEE ICIP Best Paper Award (2013). He received an IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award (1998), an IEEE Third Millenium Medal (2000), an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturership (2002), and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2014). In 2015 he received the Society Award, which is the highest career award bestowed by the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Alfred Hero's recent research interests are in high dimensional spatio-temporal data, multi-modal data integration, statistical signal processing, and machine learning. Of particular interest are applications to social networks, network security and forensics, computer vision, and personalized health.