Machine learning tools can sift through huge databases of photos and video, helping archive historical objects and interpret medical images.
Cameras are everywhere these days: capturing everyday moments, recording exceptional events and objects, and helping doctors take a closer look at our bodies when we’re sick. But while we’re very good at collecting this information, it can be hard find a particular file later or to spot an abnormality in a medical scan.
Matthew Kyan, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at York University’s Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program, uses machine learning and pattern recognition to make photos and videos easier to retrieve when we need them.
Beyond home videos and selfies, Kyan’s interdisciplinary collaborations are making big contributions from historical archives and archaeology to health and medicine.
“We work with filmmakers, working on cultural heritage types of projects,” says Kyan. “We’re looking through large archives of historical data. We also work with archaeologists, digitizing and storing large collections of artifacts to build tools that can more effectively allow them to query these large databases.”
