This period covers:- Teaching- Keynotes and invited lectures- Social events- Mathematica
My passion is teaching.My annual postgraduate course (and book) on 'Front-End Vision and Multi-Scale Image Analysis' (FEV) at TU/e was popular. The course consisted of 24 oral lectures, distributed over 2 weeks. After every 3 lectures a full afternoon computer class was given to exercise the discussed material. The course lectures and labs were fully given with interactive use of Mathematica. The participants were ASCI PhD students, and final year MSc students of TU/e (many departments). From 2017 the course was renamed 'Front-End Vision and Deep Learning'.
Next to this course we were teaching the courses: 'Algoritms in Image Analysis', 'Introduction to Mathematica', 'Medical Image Analysis', labs on 'Computer-Aided Diagnosis' and 'Mathematical Image Analysis'.
"The best way to learn anything is to teach it."
The national research school 'ASCI' (Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, established in 1995) offers a course program for doctoral students. My Front-End Vision course was selected as ASCI's national PhD course on computer vision.
Front-nd Vision, class 2011
One of the spearpoint educational methods at TU/e is 'problem-oriented learning' (also called 'design-oriented learning'). Students are put in small groups, and solve the challenge independently. The groups get smaller over the years, with complexity of the problems and independence of the students increasing: first year - groups of 8, second year - 4, third year - 2 and the last year the student is on his/her own.We have set up many different topics, the picture shows students analyzing red blood cells: design a softare program to classify healthy cells from sick ones. It was often a competion, and great fun. I found Mathematica an ideal software environment to design the solution of a complex biomedical problem, and did all my projects with it.
I also stimulated the use of this proven method in our sister BMIE School in Shenyang, China, see this ICED2016 paper.
Executive Board TU/e
CEO & Founder of Delft Imaging
Sponsored by Oldelft Benelux, ROGAN Delft, Organon, TU/e University Fund, Unilever, Year Club Olympus 1958 and Year Club '74/ESC we received full funding to acquire an educational PACS system for our Biomedical Image Analysis teaching of BME students. Here some pictures of the official opening.
TU/e Biomedical Engineering students practicing the exercises of the Front-End Vision course in Mathematica (see below).
At TU/e every freshman is given a powerful laptop (at a very low price) so they all are well-equipped. The campus license (primary service) for Mathematica enabled free, unlimited, always updated and widespread use.
Best BME MSc Teacher Awards, 2008, 2009, 2010 - TU Eindhoven. PS: After three times I was no longer allowed to participate in the competition (!).
I also regularly gave lectures at highschools, and several times on the 'Children's University' at TU/e. Fun!
Even during my travel adventures with Hetty I love teaching. Here I am learning monks of the Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon (Myanmar) how the moon rotates around the earth. [31-12-2005]
In all my research and teaching I have used Mathematica, during my full career. It is the best design software ever written. When I started my group at TU/e, I needed a specialist in Mathematica, and was extremely happy to find Markus van Almsick. He was trained as theoretical physicist, and had followed, during his PhD in Germany, his supervisor who moved to Champaign in the US. He became addicted to (nextdoor) Mathematica, and on return looked for a job combining both the finishing of his PhD and exploiting his Mathematica knowledge. Finding each other was a very fortunate win-win. Markus stayed for 8 years in my group.
Markus van Almsick
Markus and I organized in 2008 the successful International Mathematica Symposium (IMS 2018) in Maastricht. See more pictures here.
Most of the PhD and MSc students fully worked in Mathematica, and all students of the Front-End Vision course, as well as bachelor's students projects and international visiting students.
I was invited several times to give a keynote address on Wolfram Technology Conferences, and received in 2013 the Mathematica Innovator Award.
Lecturing for Studium Generale, TU Eindhoven, 21 Feb 2018, "Learning from the brain".
I have been a frequently invited speaker at (inter)national conferences, summer schools and tutorial meetings. For an overview of the keynotes and invited lectures, see here. In 2019 I was awarded the prestigious IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer Award.I gave EMBS DL lectures in New York, Istanbul, Coimbra, Egmond aan Zee, Sendai and Taipei.
I am EAMBES Fellow since 2012.
I am Life Senior Member of IEEE.
I have always been inspired by my father Barend, the best speecher of all. A truly emotional moment in my life was his speech from the pulpit (he is the 'sun of a preacher man') on the occasion of my inaugural lecture at TU/e (22 March 2002). It was in the Orangerie in 's-Hertogenbosch, a former church where we had a large party that night.
On 1 December 2017 I gave my valedictory lecture at Eindhoven University, for a full house in the TU/e Auditorium. It was a heartwarming event. It was accompanied with a Symposium, and in the evening we had a wonderful party with my students, colleagues, family and friends. Bram Platel gave a heart-warming speech. My successor is the very capable prof. Josien Pluim.
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I am still active, lecturing (national and international), and writing a new interactive tutorial book (yes: again a computational interactive essay in Mathematica): Explainable AI – Neuro-mathematics bridging deep learning and human vision. Coming soon.Some pre-views are given during several workshops:- DeepLearn Spring 2022, 18+19 April 2022, Guimaraes, Portugal (with 4.5 hours video-recorded life coding)- SSIMA 2022, 5-9 September 2022, Oradea, West Romania
In the media:- Medisch Journaal Maxima 2021 - 50 jaar (in Dutch)
The atmosphere in my group at TU/e was wonderful. Every year, end of August, we went for a weekend to the Belgian Ardennes, for our social event. Each time, I rented a different large house for 20-25 people.
The program was always the same: we arrived Friday end of the afternoon, and together we cooked our international dinner (e.g. with Macedonian meat stew, Russian pie, Portuguese soup etc.). In the evening we gathered at the fireside, with some bottles of wine, and presented each other '5-minutes about the other side of me' PowerPoint stories. This was always great fun, giving an amazing insight in the speaker. We learned about hobbies, fugitives support, Russian corruption, Catalonian independence, church activities, travel adventures ... It was often accompanied with demos such as climbing the house with ropes and carabiners, karate demos, trumpet solos and even belly-dancing. It was always fascinating.The next day we hiked in the woods, of canoed, or toured by bicycle. Saturday evening was the second international dinner round, and the second round of presentations (which never took 5 minutes ...), till deep in the night. Sunday was sleeping late, a extensive brunch, and returning home. It brought us close to each other, and built further respect. And we still talk about it!
The TU/e-BME Student Union, 'Protagoras', is very active in organizing informative and social events for the students. One such activity is the bi-annual Studytour, a 2-week trip abroad to discover new frontiers in BME. I was invited to join them on four trips, to Scandinavia (Dec 2001), to China (Mar 2006 and Apr 2016), and to Japan (Apr 2018).
Climbing the Great Wall in China between Jinshalin and Simatai, 02-04-2006.
25-04-2006. Festive evening organized by the sister BMIE School in Shenyang for the TU/e BME Studytour students.
During the visit of the TU/e BME students to BMIE in Shenyang, I organized a festive dinner where I asked the Chinese students (normally the shy ones compared to the Dutch students) to showed their Chinese culture. They proudly did, see the videos below. 28-04-2016.
It was an interesting day where cultures meet for the visiting TU/e students. Joining a Tai Chi session in the park in the morning, an joint BMIE-TU/e English class, and special performances by the Chinese BMIE students. We were given a show of historic Chinese dress culture of the nobility by GAO Xiaosong. And at the end we had the dragon come in!I had seen the dragon during lunch in the crowded restaurant. I asked the student to find it. I still remember the excited message I got the day before the event: 'professor Bart, we found the dragon. It is at Software Engineering, and we may borrow it !'.
In January 2002 Protagoras made a studytour to Scandinavia (Denmark & Sweden). Here our BME students are amazed by the electronic phantom patient in the training center of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. KTH is the largest and most respected technical university in Sweden.
After my retirement, I became a donor of the Eindhoven University Fund.The funding is spent on enabling international experiences of Biomedical Engineering students. See the interview in the 2021 annual report (in Dutch):
SSIMA is well-known by its high-level of speakers, among others: Nicos Paragios, Nicolas Ayache, Alejandro Frangi (best lecturer I know), Polina Golland, Andrei Broder, Dave Hawkes, George Verghese, Ovidiu Andronesi, Marius Leordeanu, Laurent Cohen, George Haber, Alex Vasilescu, Laurent Cohen, Stefan Carp, Natalia Trayanova, Wiro Niessen, Nahum Kiryati, Michal Guindy, Alon Wolf, Peter Meer and many others (and myself).
I am board member and co-founder (together with Lect. Elena Ovreiu and prof. Alfred Bruckstein) of SSIMA, the annual International Summer School on Imaging with Medical Applications in Romania, the largest medical imaging summer school in Eastern Europe.With week-long editions from 2015-2019 in Sinaia, Bucharest, Brasov, Sibiu and Bucharest, editions 2020 and 2021 were skipped due to Covid-19. The 2022 edition is from 5-9 September 2022 in Orodea, Romania.
SSIMA website
At the SSIMA 2019 gala with Wiro Niessen (left) and Alex Frangi (right), which I both highly respect.
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