Invited Speakers

Anton van den Hengel, 

School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide

Anton is currently a Professor in the Scool of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, the Director of the Australian Centre for Visual Techonolgies, and a Program Leader in The Data to Decisions (D2D) CRC.

He has worked in a variety of research areas within Computer Vision including Parameter Estimation, Machine Learning, Video Surveillance and Interactive Image-based Modelling. In each case his discoveries have come through the application of fundamental mathematics to problems of practical impact. His CV is available here.

Keynote

Image-based structural plant phenomics, and why we’re asking the wrong questions

Abstract

Image-based plant phenomics methods offer a revolutionary insight into the development of plant structure over time because they enable repeated measurements of individual plant features at high spatial and temporal resolution.  The key features of the image based approach that enable this developmental information to be uncovered are the non-destructive nature of the mensuration, the low labour requirements and the fact that they remove the differences between different human operators as a source of noise.  The opportunity this new source of information provides is to adopt methods developed in the machine learning community to extract information about complex systems from large volumes of data.  This means moving from the reductionist approach and single-hypothesis tests to techniques that embrace the complexity of biological systems and the huge volume of data that image-based phenomics can generate.