Margrit Betke's Bio

Margrit Betke is a Professor of Computer Science at Boston University, where she co-leads the Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative and the Image and Video Computing Research Group. She conducts research in computer vision, human-computer interfaces, human computation, medical image analysis, and application of machine learning. She has developed 2D and 3D methods for detection, segmentation, registration, and tracking of people, bats and birds, vehicles, gestures, live cells, tumors, etc. in visible-light, infrared, and x-ray image data. She has published over 150 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). After completing a $2.8 million NSF research project on developing intelligent tracking systems that reason about the group behavior of people, animals, and cells, she now leads a $1 million NSF project on designing analytic methods for studying visual and textual public information, including news and social media.

Prof. Betke's research has been supported by the following grants:

NSF BIGDATA: IA: Multiplatform, Multilingual, and Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in over 100 Languages, 1838193, $1,000,000 for 4 years (PI).
ONR MURI: Neuro-Autonomy: Neuroscience-Inspired Perception, Navigation, and Spatial Awareness for Autonomous Robots. $7.5 million for 5 years (Co-PI).
Google Faculty Research Award: Providing Real-time Content with Balanced Political Views, $88,301 for 1 year (PI)
NSF INT: Collaborative Research: Detecting, Predicting and Remediating Student Affect and Grit using Computer Vision 1551572, $614,990 for 4 years (PI).
NSF 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).
NSF MRI Collaborative: Development of iRehab, an Intelligent Closed-Loop Instrument for Adaptive Rehabilitation, 1337866, $ 200,109 for 3 years (PI).
ONR MURI: AIRFOILS, Animal Inspired Flight with Outer and Inner Loop Strategies, BU News, $7.5 million (Senior Researcher) for 5 years.
NSF HCC: Large: Intelligent Tracking Systems that Reason about Group Behavior, 0910908, $ 2,858,292 for 5 years (PI). Project website.
NSF II-EN: Infrastructure for Gesture Interface Research Outside the Lab, 0855065 (Co-PI)
NSF HCC: Intelligent Interfaces to Empower People with Disabilities to Participate in the Information Society, 0713229 (PI)
NSF CAREER: Video-Based Computer Interfaces for People with Severe Disabilities, 0093367 (PI)
NSF Mining and Indexing Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Video Databases of Human Motion, 0308213 (Co-PI)
NSF ITR: Advanced Imaging and Information Technology for Assessing the Ecological and Economic Impact of Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats on Agroecosystems, 0326483 (Co-PI)
NSF Pattern Discovery in Signed Languages and Gestural Communication, 0329009 (Co-PI)
NSF CISE Research Infrastructure: SENSORIUM: Research Infrastructure for Managing Spatio-Temporal Objects in Video Sensor Network, 0202067 (Co-PI)
ONR DURIP: Lab Upgrade for Machine Vision Research and Research-Related Education, $246,242 (Co-PI).
NSF MRI: Research Laboratory for Computer Science, 9871219 (PI)

Prof. Betke's research has also been supported by grants from Adobe Research (2016), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (2005), The Naval Undersea Warfare Center (2009), and Bat Conservation International (2009), a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife (2008), The Whitaker Foundation (2001-2004), and a subcontract from MIT Lincoln Laboratory under a US Air Force prime contract (2005).