Abstract:  With a visual system that accounts for as much as 30% of their lifted mass, flying insects such as dragonflies and hoverflies invest more in vision than any other animal. Many of these insects engage in visually guided behavior, ranging from precise hovering flight, to spectacular aerial pursuit of other insects. Impressive visual performance is subserved by a surprisingly simple visual system. In a typical insect eye, between 2,000 and 30,000 pixels in the image are analyzed by fewer than 200,000 neurons in underlying neural circuits. The combination of sophisticated visual processing with an approachable level of complexity has made the insect visual system a leading model for biomimetic approaches to computer vision. I will describe research from my own lab, where we use a combination of neurophysiological recording techniques and computer modeling to study neurons involved in stabilization of flight.

Biography:  I completed my Ph.D., on the optics of spider eyes, in 1989 at Flinders University, having also worked at RSBS (A.N.U.) and the University of Sussex in the U.K. After that I worked for 4 years (until 1993) on object detecting neurons in dragonflies, as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Adrian Horridge and Dr M.V.Srinivasan at RSBS. I then worked as Research Fellow with Simon Laughlin, in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge until 1998, when I moved to my present position as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. My work over the last 5 years or so has focused on visual ecology in nocturnal and diurnal insects, in signal processing and motion detection by the insect visual system and on the analysis of polarized light by spiders.

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