Postdoctoral Positions in Biomedical imaging, Scientific Visualization, Computer Vision

NASA-Supported Postdoctoral Fellow in Satellite Imaging (immediately available)

NIH-Supported Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioimaging Informatics
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65203

Biology Dept.
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA, 01003

Postdoctoral positions are available to join a research project in the quantification of deformable motion in biology, with emphasis on cell motility. The positions are supported by an NIH-funded collaboration between Tobias I. Baskin (a biologist at Univ of Massachusetts, Amherst) and K. Palaniappan (a computer scientist at Univ of Missouri, Columbia). One position will be at Columbia, the other at Amherst. The UMass position has been filled and the UMC position has become available. Baskin and Palaniappan have developed new software for quantifying the spatial distribution of velocity within a growing plant organ (a root). The software is called RootflowRT and the biological application is described by van der Weele et al (2003 Plant Physiology, 32:1138-1148). The software implements a novel algorithm for quantifying deformable motion that combines structure-tensor and robust-matching approaches. The UMass position focuses on extending RootflowRT. The successful candidate will have experience with both imaging in biology as well as computer programming, in the area of image analysis.

The UMC research direction has led to extremely promising algorithms for cell tracking (hundreds of motile cells over hundreds of time-lapse image sequences) with application to high throughput sequencing studies for genome analysis and drug discovery. Quantitative live cell imaging within a biological context offers promising new opportunities to understand cellular and sub-cellular processes that have never been observed before, ranging from the autophagic clustering behavior of cancer cells to microtubule regulation of actin. A series of recent papers listed below describe the computational algorithms for tracking deformable motion of biological objects, in particular motile animal cells and embryos. The position at Missouri is primarily computational (with bio-imaging opportunities possible based on candidate interest). The successful candidate for this position will have a strong background in several areas of image/volume analysis with an emphasis in active contour/ level set based segmentation, fusion and object tracking.

1. Filiz Bunyak, Kannappan Palaniappan, Sumit Kumar Nath, and Gunasekaran Seetharaman, Flux tensor constrained geodesic active contours with sensor fusion for persistent object tracking, Journal of Multimedia, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 20-33, Aug 2007. (PDF)
2. F. Bunyak, K. Palaniappan, S. K. Nath, G. Seetharaman, Geodesic active contour-based fusion of visible and infrared video for persistent object tracking, IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision, Austin, TX, Feb 21-22, 2007.
3. S. K. Nath, K. Palaniappan, F. Bunyak, Cell segmentation using coupled level sets and graph-vertex coloring, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (MICCAI 2006), Vol. 4190, pp. 101-108.
4. S. K. Nath, F. Bunyak, K. Palaniappan, Robust tracking of migrating cells using four-color level set segmentation, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (ACIVS 2006), Vol. 4179, Springer-Verlag, pp. 920-932.
5. F. Bunyak, K. Palaniappan, S. K. Nath, T. I. Baskin, G. Dong, Quantitative cell motility for in vitro wound healing using level set-based active contour tracking, IEEE 3rd Int. Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, Arlington, VA, April 6-9, 2006, pp. 1040-1043.
6. G. Dong, T. I. Baskin, K. Palaniappan, Motion flow estimation from image sequences with applications to biological growth and motility, IEEE Int. Conf. Image Processing, Atlanta, GA, Oct 8-11, 2006.
7. S. Nath, K. Palaniappan, Adaptive robust structure tensors for orientation estimation and image segmentation, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Advances in Visual Computing), Vol 3804, ISBN 3-540-30750-8, Springer-Verlag, Int. Symposium on Visual Computing, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Dec. 5-7, 2005, pp. 445-453.
8. K. Palaniappan, Hai Jiang, Tobias I Baskin, Non-rigid motion estimation using the robust tensor method, IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop on Articulated and Nonrigid Motion, Washington, DC, IEEE Computer Society Press, June 27, 2004, pp. 25-33.

Those interested in the computational bioimaging position (UMC) should contact Dr Palaniappan (email: palaniappank@missouri.edu), and can find further information from his web page: http://www.cs.missouri.edu/facultypages/palani.html and the multimedia communications lab page: http://meru.cs.missouri.edu/ . The Univ of Missouri-Columbia has completed a new $60M Life Sciences building and there are many opportunities for collaboration with several life sciences and biomedical imaging experimental groups.

Those interested in the biological computation position (UMass) should contact Dr Baskin (email: baskin@bio.umass.edu), and can find further information from his web page: http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/baskin/ and the page for RootflowRT http://meru.rnet.missouri.edu/mvl/bio_motion.

We encourage applications from anyone regardless of ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or nationality. The University of Missouri is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity/ employer and ADA Institution. To request ADA accommodations, please contact our ADA Coordinator at (573) 884-7278, or send e-mail to adawww@showme.missouri.edu.

About the University of Missouri-Columbia

The University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC or MU) was established in 1839 as the first public university west of the Mississippi river in the Louisiana Purchase - territory that was acquired from Napolean in 1803 by US President Thomas Jefferson. UMC is a nonprofit land grant academic and research institution that is recognized as one of the leading tier-one research and Carnegie-Doctoral-Research-Extensive institutions in the country. UMC is the flagship public university in the state of Missouri with over 21,500 undergraduate and 7,000 graduate and professional students. UMC has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 1908; the AAU was founded in 1900 and is currently composed of 62 leading research universities in the US and Canada.

UMC is a leading research univeristy and one of only six American universities with the greatest breadth of academic units on a single campus that includes engineering, science, mathematics, medicine, business, law, journalism, agriculture, natural resources, environmental sciences, veterinary medicine, health sciences, nursing, education, humanities, and liberal arts. This enables novel collaborations in multidisciplinary research to be pursued, for example, engineering and medicine. UMC's current endowment campaign goal is to raise $1 billion by the end of 2008 - the 26th public university in the nation to have such a campaign.

The values embraced by the UMC academic community are discovery, excellence, respect, and responsibility. In order to maintain and extend leading accomplishments in teaching, research, service and economic development (entrepreneurship), it is essential that our staff members be of the highest merit and ability with outstanding research and teaching potential.

Ongoing Postdoc Positions. Openings are available for postdoctoral fellowship or visiting research professor positions in video and image analysis, scientific visualization, computer vision, computer graphics and related fields in the Dept. of Computer Science at the Univ. of Missouri-Columbia. Candidates interested in conducting breakthrough research in the following areas are encouraged to apply:

1. Nonrigid motion estimation, data mining, image understanding and parallel algorithm development for object classification, segmentation, stereo analysis and coding for homeland security, remote sensing and biomedical applications;
2. Image processing, image analysis, machine intelligence, data mining and other novel approaches applied to multispectral multitemporal biological and geophysical datasets.
3. Scientific visualization applied to the analysis and interactive manipulation of geophysical remote sensing datasets, bioinformatics, video visualization and databases, content-based retrieval, virtual reality, data mining using information visualization, network topology visualization;
4. Digital video over information networks applied to very low bit rate video coding using the wavelet transform, visual content analysis, coding and retrieval, and intelligent network access to compressed multimedia datasets in digital libraries;
5. Advanced human computer interfaces such as speech and gesture to improve interaction with complex datasets in realistic environments with multiple users.

We have some exciting new initiatives with the Naval Research Lab, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NASA, and Boeing in image understanding, data mining, CBIR, data fusion, automatic classification and compression of multispectral remote sensing datasets (land cover classification of Landsat data), collaborative visualization of 3D datasets over high speed networks, etc.

Candidates must have completed a doctoral degree in CS, ECE or related field. Applicants must have an excellent research record, high potential for publication, strong interest in collaboration, and good communication skills. Salary commensurate with prior experience.

Please send a resume, a statement of research plans (and teaching if appropriate), and three reference letters to:

Dr. K.Palaniappan
Dept. of Computer Science
329 Engineering Bldg. West
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, MO 65211-2060
(573) 884-9266, Fax: (573) 882-8318
email: palaniappank@missouri.edu
http://meru.cecs.missouri.edu

The University of Missouri is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity/ employer and ADA Institution. To request ADA accommodations, please contact our ADA Coordinator at (573) 884-7278, or send e-mail to adawww@showme.missouri.edu.

Updated Nov 29, 2007

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