Bruno Olshausen

Bruno OIshausen is Professor of Neuroscience and Optometry at the University of California, Berkeley.  He also serves as Director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on mathematical and computational models of brain function.  He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology.  Prior to Berkeley he was a member of the Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior at UC Davis.  During postdoctoral work with David Field at Cornell he developed the sparse coding model of visual cortex which provides a linking principle between natural scene statistics and the response properties of visual neurons.  Olshausen's current research aims to understand the information processing strategies employed by the brain for doing tasks such as object recognition and scene analysis.  This work seeks not only to advance our understanding of the brain, but also to discover new algorithms for scene analysis based on how brains work.