Shimon Ullman

My general area of research is the study of vision - including the processing of visual information by the human visual system, and computer vision. The goals of this research are to understand how our own visual system operates, and how to construct artificial systems with visual capabilities including, for example, aids for the visually impaired. The two goals, understanding human vision and computer vision, are strongly interconnected. At present, the performance of the human visual system is superior in almost every respect to that of machine vision systems. This is particularly striking in the case of object classification, where the performance of the best computer models cannot rival the performance of a three year old child. The study of the computations performed by the human visual system can therefore lead to new insights and to the development of new and better methods for analyzing visual information. At the same time, given the enormous complexity of the human visua