Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot 76100 Israel

The Weizmann Institute of Science,

a center of scientific research and graduate study, founded in 1934 by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the distinguished scientist and first president of Israel. It is a community of 2,400 scientists and support staff, including more than 700 scientists-in-training pursuing advanced degrees at the Institute's Feinberg Graduate School. Dr. Weizmann organized the fledgling Institute as a unique experiment in scientific pioneering; it would pursue "pure" science while at the same time dealing with practical problems facing the country and its economy. The Weizmann Institute was, almost since its inception, a research pioneer. Many of its achievements in research and science teaching have done much to improve the human condition in Israel and throughout the world, and have gained many international honors and prizes. The Weizmann Institute maintains excellence by concentrating on talent, developing its research areas in each case around a core of world-class scientists. Although far removed from the world centers of science, the Weizmann Institute attracts scientists from around the globe and maintains strong ties with preeminent research institutions in the Americas, Europe and the Far East. Today the Institute carries out some 800 projects, both basic and applied, across the spectrum of contemporary science. Its 18 departments are grouped into five faculties: Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Physics.

The Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

at the Weizmann Institute of Science is the host for the Moross Laboratory for Vision Research and Robotics and the Gauss Center for Scientific Computation. The Moross Laboratory for Vision Research and Robotics, headed by Prof. Shimon Ullman, includes four faculty members, two post-doctoral fellows and more than 25 graduate students. The laboratory performs research in computer vision on problems such as object recognition, image segmentation, motion analysis, video processing, medical imaging, and robot navigation. The Carl F. Gauss Center for Scientific Computation, directed by Prof. Achi Brandt, was inaugurated in the fall of 1993 thanks to a generous endowment from the Ministry for Science and Technology (BMFT) of the Federal Republic of Germany, through the joint committee for German-Israeli cooperation (Minerva). Its objective is to act as a catalyst for the development of new fundamental computational approaches in physics, chemistry, applied mathematics and engineering, introducing, in particular, advanced multi-scale (multi-resolution) and parallel-processing methods. In addition to developing advanced computational approaches to diverse fields in mathematics, science and engineering, the center is involved in developing multi-scale algorithms for early vision tasks such as surface reconstruction, edge and fiber detection, segmentation, and meaningful picture coarsening.

Role of WEIZMANN within AIM@SHAPE

WEIZMANN contributes to Aim@Shape through ongoing research on problems related to the acquisition and reconstruction of shapes from 2D and 3D data. In addition, Weizmann investigates statistical learning techniques for feature detection, and explores multi-resolution representations that are relevant to shape description and semantic interpretation. The department is renown for its pioneering and leading research on multi-scale computation and for its internationally famous research on high level computer vision problems. They have been involved in several EU-projects in recent years including ESPRIT and IST programs. They will actively contribute to integration efforts by sharing software and databases, help organise workshops and meetings sponsored by or related to the project, exchange students and researchers with other Partners, and participate in designing common curriculum for training activities.