Margrit Betke is a Professor of Computer Science at Boston University,
where she co-leads the Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR)
Initiative and the Image and Video Computing Research (IVC) Group and
is the Department's Director of the "MS in AI" academic program. Her
focus is integrative research in AI, computer vision, human computer
interaction, medical image analysis, and application of machine
learning. She has developed 2D and 3D methods for detection,
segmentation, registration, pose estimation, and tracking of people,
bats and birds, vehicles, gestures, live cells, tumors, etc, in
visible-light, infrared, x-ray, magnetic resonance, and ultrasound
data. She has published over 200 original research papers, as well as
research datasets and software. She earned her Ph.D. degree in
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1995. Prof. Betke received the
National Science Foundation (NSF) 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 journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). She has been Principal
Investigator of large NSF-funded research projects, for example, on
developing intelligent tracking systems that reason about the group
behavior, and on designing analytic methods for studying visual and
textual public information, including news and social media. She
advised the research projects of many undergraduate and graduate
students, and, under her guidance, fourteen students completed their
PhD dissertations.
Prof. Betke's research has been supported by the following grants:
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NSF BIGDATA: IA: Multiplatform, Multilingual, and Multimodal Tools for Analyzing Public Communication in over 100 Languages,
1838193, $1,000,000 for 4 years (PI).
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ONR MURI: Neuro-Autonomy: Neuroscience-Inspired Perception, Navigation, and
Spatial Awareness for Autonomous Robots. $7.5 million for 5 years (Co-PI).
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NIH 1R21TW011343-01: Mobile bedside ultrasound (mBSUS) for the diagnosis of pediatric pneumonia
in resource limited settings. $199,220, 2019-2021 (Co-I).
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NIH 1R21TW010939-01: Project SEARCH (Scanning EARs for Child Health). $275,000, 2018-2020 (Co-I).
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Google Faculty Research Award: Providing Real-time Content with Balanced Political Views,
$88,301 for 1 year (PI)
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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.
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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)
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NSF Pattern Discovery in Signed Languages and Gestural Communication,
0329009 (Co-PI)
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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).