Justus H. Piater

After completing my studies in computer science in Braunschweig and Magdeburg in Germany, I was awarded a Fulbright graduate-student fellowship. One year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA) turned into five, and resulted in a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. Funded by a Marie-Curie fellowship, I then spent a couple of years as a postdoctoral researcher at Projet PRIMA (INRIA Rhône-Alpes) in France before joining the Montefiore Institute. The academic year 2008–09 I spent on sabbatical leave at the Department of Empirical Inference (B. Schölkopf) at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, with which I continue to be affiliated as a guest scientist. My research activities are in computer vision and machine learning. Much of my research is motivated by the concept of agents that use vision as a mode of perception in an interactive context. My long-term goal is to understand biological systems and to construct artificial systems that learn to see and to