Margrit Betke's Personal Homepage

Margrit Betke's Personal Web Page

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 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 postdoc at University of Maryland under Larry Davis. I moved back to Boston in 1997, where I joined 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 focuses on computer vision, in particular, object detection, segmentation, registration, recognition, and tracking. I am very excited my three main application areas. I have worked 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 worked on "intelligent vehicles" and microscopy image analyis of cells. For many of my research projects, students in my research group have made significant contributions and won awards.

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 love traveling, sports, reading, gardening, 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. 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. Among my favorite novels books are "Het woeden der gehele wereld" (The Rage of the Whole World) by Maarten 't Hart, "Daughter of Fortune" by Isabel Allende, and the books by BU's Ha Jin. In late 2016, I read "The Totilla Curtain" by T.C. Boyle (and was surprised how relevant this 1997 book is to ongoing political discussions about immigration), I loved Hope Jahren's "Lab Girl" and recently (2022), Marina Endicott's "The Voyage of the Morning Light."

In 2014, my husband and I rescued a wild dog, Shilah, who we met while hiking in the Grand Canyon. I sometimes bring Shilah with me to BU, and you may meet her. Shilah doesn't understand why strangers may want to pet her, but if you hold out a treat for her, she'll take it carefully from your hand.

With my husband Jon. My friends