David Stork

Dr. David G. Stork
Chief Scientist
Ricoh Silicon Valley
2882 Sand Hill Road #115
Menlo Park, CA 94025-7022
stork@rsv.ricoh.com
650-496-5720 (w)
650-529-1277 (h)
650-854-8740 (fax)

Biographical Information

Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His primary interests lie in pattern recognition, machine learning, information retrieval, neural networks and novel uses of the internet. He is the founder and leader of the Open Mind Initiative, sits on the editorial boards of five international journals, and has published over a hundred peer-reviewed papers and five books, including "HAL's Legacy: 2001's computer as dream and reality" (MIT Press) for general audiences and the second edition of "Pattern Classification" with R. Duda and P. Hart (Wiley).

Suggested Lecture Topics

Did the great masters "cheat" using optics?
The mysterious rise in naturalism in Renaissance painting

In 2001, artist David Hockney and scientist Charles Falco stunned the art world with a controversial theory that, if correct, would profoundly alter our view of the development of image making. They claimed that as early as 1420, Renaissance artists employed optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images onto their canvases, which they then traced or painted over. In this way, the theory attempts to explain the newfound heightened naturalism or "opticality" of painters such as Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, Hans Holbein the Younger, and many others.

This talk for general audiences, profusely illustrated with Renaissance paintings, will present the results of the first independent examinations of the Hockney/Falco theory. It covers basic geometrical optics of image formation, shadows and perspective as well as 15th-century technology with special emphasis on Lotto's "Husband and wife" (1543), van Eyck's "Portrait of Arnolfini and his wife" (1434), Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaus" (1596-8) and Campin's "Merode Altarpiece" (1425). While there remain some loose ends, an analysis of the paintings, infra-red reflectograms, modern reenactments, internal consistency of the theory, and alternate explanations allow us to judge with high confidence the plausibility of this new theory. You may never see Renaissance paintings the same way again (http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~stork/FAQs.html).

The Open Mind Initiative:
A large-scale web-based framework for collecting data contributed by non-experts

There is a growing realization that progress in many branches of artificial intelligence, pattern classification, information retrieval and related fields depends more on the use of large data sets than on improved algorithms or improved representations. This realization highlights the need for novel and more powerful methods for collecting and 'truthing' large knowledge bases, particularly those contributed by non-experts.

I will discuss several Open Mind projects -- common sense, indoor common sense, cursive optical character recognition, handwritten digit recognition, facial expression, animals, and 'learner' (1001 questions) -- as well as closely related projects, all with a particular focus on the lessons learned about interfaces, reward structures, efficient self-policing and methods to thrwart hostile 'contributors,' and so on. I also present current efforts toward identifying and solving fundamental outstanding problems in the mathematical theory of data acquisition and truthing.

I conclude with a vision of future projects and opportunities for harvesting and using such contributed data in conjunction with mined and structured expert data.

Additional Information

If you wish to invite David Stork to speak, please refer to his travel plans below when planning your event.