Daniel Bear Email & Phone Number

How do we understand the world through our senses? My dream is to understand the foundations of perception -- how our perceptual abilities evolved, develop, and change throughout our lives -- well enough to recreate them in machines. These machines will extend our perceptual experience, relieve us of the work we'd rather not do, and support us when our senses fail. Plus, they'll be amazingly fun to design and create!Taking to heart Feynman's final blackboard -- "What I cannot create, I do not understand" -- for the past six years I've been trying to build computer vision algorithms that see the world the way we do. This led to a unified computational model of how different facets of visual perception arise through development and learning. Before that, I did my Ph.D. work on the sense of smell, where I discovered a new molecular mechanism through which we (mammals) sense important odors.