Margrit Betke's Personal Web Page 
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Margrit Betke's Personal Web Page |
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I grew up in St. Augustin
, a small town between Bonn,
where I went to college in
computer science at the RFW
University of Bonn, and
Siegburg in the beautiful Rhineland in Germany. Bonn was founded
as a fort on the Rhine to keep the Germanic barbarians out of the
Roman empire. Siegburg had its peak in medieval times when it was
ruled by the powerful Benedictine order. As many Europeans, I was
shaped by and therefore care deeply about our old history. In 1989, I
decided to try the New World with an FES
fellowship. I went to grad school at MIT's EECS department for my Master's
and PhD
work. My advisor was
Ron Rivest, winner of the
2002 Turing Award. After I graduated, I spent two years in
Washington DC (a great city!), where I was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland under Larry Davis. I got
married in Glen Cove, NY, in 1996. My husband
and I moved back to Boston in 1997, where he joined MIT's Ocean Engineering Department and I Boston College's Computer Science Department.
Since summer 2000, I have been with the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Boston University, where my research focus is computer vision, in particular, object detection, segmentation, registration, recognition, and tracking. I am very excited my three main application areas. I work with a radiologist, my friend Jane Ko, on developing methods for tumor diagnosis in chest CT images. I also work on developing human-camera-computer interfaces that will enable people with severe disabilities to communicate and access information on the computer. Most recently, I have been involved in thermal image analysis of bats emerging in huge numbers from caves in Texas. I have also work on "intelligent vehicles" and general object recognition. For many of my research projects, students in my research group have made significant contributions. If you are a BU undergraduate or graduate student interested in joining my group, come and talk to me and visit the Image and Video Computing reading group, which meets once a week during the semester. I spent my spare time as much as possible with my husband and family. I love traveling, sports, reading, flowers, photography, and music. When I grew up, I used to go skiing with my family in Adelboden, a beautiful place in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. I have been taking modern dance classes at BU -- they are a lot of fun. I also love sailing and judo. In grad school I had a chance to sing some beautiful pieces, such as Verdi and Brahm's Requiems, Bach's Mass in B-Minor, Hayden's Creation, and Haendel's Messiah in MIT's Concert Choir under John Oliver. My favorite recently read books are "Het woeden der gehele wereld" (The Rage of the Whole World) by Maarten 't Hart and "Daughter of Fortune" by Isabel Allende.
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 My cousin Robert's children. |
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| Caroline's first day in school | |
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| Richard at the North Sea, August 2006 |
A link to my high school: Albert Einstein Gymnasium.
