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Heinrich Buelthoff
Max Planck Institute for Biocybernetics
Membership Number: 18
Address: Spemannstr. 38, D-72076, Tübingen, Germany
Email: heinrich.buelthoff@tuebingen.mpg.de
Phone: +49 (0) 7071 601 - 600
Fax: +49 (0) 7071 601 - 616
URL: www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de

Biographical Sketch
Heinrich Bülthoff (1950) is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany and Honorary Professor at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. He studied biology in Tübingen and Berlin and received his doctoral degree in 1980. He spent 3 years as a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the faculty of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University in 1988. In 1993 he was elected Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Dr. Bülthoff has published more than 100 articles in scholarly journals in the areas of object and face recognition, integration of visual modules, sensorimotor integration, autonomous navigation and artificial life. He is currently engaged in joint research projects with scientists at Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the NEC Research Institute, Oxford University, Tübingen University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Texas and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dr. Bülthoff’s scientific career was strongly influenced by his early physiological and theoretical investigations into orientation behavior and object detection in flies. These fundamental biological experiences remained a driving force even after his interests shifted to the psychophysical and computational aspects of higher-level visual processes, especially questions dealing with the demands that everyday visual tasks place on the human observer, and to how the knowledge gathered from these experiments could be implemented into cognitive vision systems. At the moment Dr. Bülthoff is involved in the following two EU projects: COGVIS: IST-2000-29375, and COMIC: IST-2001-32311. Heinrich Bülthoff has been elected to membership in the following societies: the Computer Society of the IEEE (1998), the Society of Neuroscience (1987), the Optical Society of America (1986), and the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (1985).

Max Planck Institut für Biologische Kybernetik (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics) MPIK
The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPIK) is one of the 81 independently organized research facilities of the Max Planck Society that carry on basic research in the interests of the general public. Since 1993 the thematic focus of the institute is the understanding of cognitive processes. In the Cognitive Human Psychophysics department about 30 biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and psychologists work on psychophysical and computational aspects of object and scene recognition, categorization of objects, cue integration and spatial cognition. Computer graphics and virtual reality technology are used to carry out psychophysical experiments in a closed perception-action loop using a motion platform. Haptic recognition of objects is studied in a haptic lab using force-feedback haptic simulators. Face recognition is studied in a face lab using a set of more than 200 laser-scanned 3D head models. Results from this research have already been applied to machine vision systems for the automatic synthesis of faces and facial expressions. Next year the physiological, psychophysical and computational research in the institute will be complemented with a new department (Theory of Cognitive Processes) that will have its main focus on statistical learning theory.


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