Inaugural Professorial Lecture – Professor Brendan McCane

The Rise of the Machines

Brendan's research is on the boundary between machine learning and computer vision. That is, how to get a computer to learn what is in an image based on example images. Some of his early work in this area included face detection and face recognition algorithms – similar to the algorithms that now run on all smart phones and social media platforms.

His work encompasses applications in medical and biological imaging including interpreting x-rays of the lumbar spine and the facial skeleton. Recently he has made contributions to the theory of deep neural networks and deep learning, and to self-learning robotics.

Brendan is also a passionate teacher and has an ongoing research project on how to best teach computer programming to novice programmers with a focus on mastery learning.

Refreshments will be served after lecture.