Margrit Betke is a Professor of Computer Science at Boston University, where she
co-leads the Image and Video Computing Research Group. She conducts research in
computer vision, in particular, the development of methods for detection,
segmentation, registration, and tracking of objects in visible-light, infrared,
and x-ray image data. She has worked on gesture, vehicle, and animal tracking,
video-based human-computer interfaces, statistical object recognition, and
medical imaging analysis. She has published over 140 original research papers.
She earned her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. Prof. Betke has received the
National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2001 for
developing "Video-based Interfaces for People with Severe Disabilities." She
co-invented the "Camera Mouse," an assistive technology used worldwide by
children and adults with severe motion impairments. While she was a Research
Scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, she
co-developed the first patented algorithms for detecting and measuring pulmonary
nodule growth in computed tomography. She was one of two academic honorees of
the "Top 10 Women to Watch in New England Award" by Mass High Tech in 2005. She
is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE and an Associate Editor of the journals
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and
Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU). Recently she led a $2.8 million
NSF research project to develop intelligent tracking systems that reason about
group behavior of people, bats, birds, and cells.
Margrit Betke was part of team awarded a 5-year $7.5 million ONR
MURI grant to develop unmanned aircraft inspired by the flight
mechanics and flight behavior of bats, birds, and insects. BU
CAS News, September 2010
Prof. Betke's research has been supported by the NSF grants
1551572,
1421943,
1337866,
0910908,
0855065,
0713229,
0093367,
0308213,
0326483,
0329009,
0202067, and
9871219:
-
INT: Collaborative Research: Detecting, Predicting and Remediating Student
Affect and Grit using Computer Vision
1551572, $614,990 for 4 years (PI).
-
RI: Small: Using Humans in the Loop to Collect High-quality Annotations from
Images and Time-lapse Videos of Cells
1421943, $370,151 for 3 years (PI).
-
MRI Collaborative: Development of iRehab, an Intelligent Closed-Loop Instrument
for Adaptive Rehabilitation,
1337866, $ 200,109 for 3 years (PI).
-
HCC: Large: Intelligent Tracking Systems that Reason about Group
Behavior,
0910908, $ 2,858,292 for 5 years (PI).
Project
website.
- II-EN: Infrastructure for Gesture Interface Research Outside the
Lab, 0855065
(Co-PI)
-
HCC: Intelligent Interfaces to Empower People with Disabilities to
Participate in the Information Society,
0713229 (PI)
-
CAREER: Video-Based Computer Interfaces for People with Severe
Disabilities,
0093367 (PI)
-
Mining and Indexing Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Video Databases of
Human Motion,
0308213 (Co-PI)
-
ITR: Advanced Imaging and Information Technology for Assessing the
Ecological and Economic Impact of Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats on
Agroecosystems,
0326483 (Co-PI)
-
Pattern Discovery in Signed Languages and Gestural Communication,
0329009 (Co-PI)
-
CISE Research Infrastructure: SENSORIUM: Research Infrastructure for Managing Spatio-Temporal Objects in Video Sensor Network,
0202067 (Co-PI)
-
MRI: Research Laboratory for Computer Science,
9871219 (PI)
Prof. Betke's research has also been supported by grants from Adobe
Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, The Naval Undersea
Warfare Center, and Bat Conservation International in 2009, a grant from the
US Fish and Wildlife in 2008, The Whitaker Foundation, 2001-2004, and a
subcontract from MIT Lincoln Laboratory under a US Air Force prime contract in
2005.