The goal of the talk is to present an overview of state-of-the-art research themes at the University
of Houston (UH). The first part of the talk will provide an overview of the research activities of the
UH Depts. of CS and ECE.

The second part will outline selected research projects of the UH Computational Biomedicine
Laboratory (CBL). Our passion for research is fueled by fundamental open problems in the
broad and challenging areas of data analytics and machine learning, and their applications on
computer vision and pattern recognition with an emphasis on human-centered computing such
as face recognition, non-verbal human behavior understanding, cardiovascular informatics,
neuro-informatics, and cancer informatics. Our mission in the pursuit of scientific excellence and
innovative engineering, enabling pragmatic solutions to problems of societal impact. For example,
our effort to understand non-verbal human behavior focuses on facial expression analysis and
activity recognition. In the domain of cardiovascular informatics, we seek to develop a new scoring
algorithm capable of identifying individuals who are at risk of suffering a heart attack in the next 12
months. Finally, in the area of neuroinformatics, we are focused on reconstructing the morphology
of single neurons towards increasing our knowledge of brain function. Recent advances in each of
these exciting research areas and challenging open problems will be highlighted.

UH, one of the largest universities in the U.S.A. with over 36,000 students, is located in one of the
most vibrant metropolitan areas. Houston, the 4th largest U.S. city, is the epicenter of the energy
industry, features the largest medical center in the world, and hosts the Johnson Space Center. The
Department’s research laboratories have joint programs with laboratories from the local medical
schools and hospitals, NASA, and the high-tech industry. Recently, UH has also launched two
strategic initiatives in the areas of Health and Energy capitalizing on its location. CBL's work
in vasa vasorum (neovascularization) imaging pioneered a new very active research area in
cardiovascular screening, our 3D-3D face recognition software ranked first in the 3D-shape section
of the 2007 Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) organized by NIST, while our 3D-2D system
outperforms the state of the art 2D-face recognition methods.
During the visit, I will be delighted to meet with anyone who is excited about the research
opportunities at the University of Houston whether they are students (internships, graduate
scholarships, postdoctoral positions) or faculty (collaborations, short term visits, sabbaticals). Please
email me directly or contact my host.