The CBMM Postdoc Group meeting will be hosted at MIT.  This week we will have a special event and collaborate with members of the GE-Analytics Team.

Summary:

Special collaboration meeting with researchers from GE Analytics.

There were 38 participants, 9 from GE and 29 CBMM postdocs, grad-students and PI’s.

Specifically, 75% of the CBMM postdoc group members attended this meeting. A similar number of CBMM graduate students have also attended and participated.

This meeting lasted 5 hours following this schedule:

11:00-12:00pm:    Presentations: Overview of the CBMM and research projects at GE

12:00-1:00pm:      Lunch

1:00-2:00pm:        Smaller interactive sessions GE presentation

2:00-3:00pm:       Smaller interactive sessions CBMM/MIT presentations

3:00-4:00pm:       Additional discussions

With the goal of creating interactive dialog and building collaborations, Mark Grabb, Rahul Bhotika and GE researchers from the analytics and healthcare groups, first presented briefly their work in visual intelligence, image analysis, anomaly detection, robotics and collaborative agents, knowledge modeling, and neuroscience, in order to provide an overview sample of topics and associate them with the relevant GE representative.

Prof. Matthew Wilson presented an overview of the CBMM mission, goals and possible relations to research and development in general.

The second part of the meeting consisted of parallel comprehensive research presentations in small groups of 3-5. During this part, the GE researchers have introduced and discussed, with postdocs and students, open industrial analytics problems that can benefit from approaches in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational neuroscience. They provided technical details on how different problems are approached, along with insights on how research is conceptualized, funded and performed on a non-academic research facility.

In the third part, some CBMM postdocs and students presented their research to GE representatives in small groups, and discussed common research interests as well as relevant industrial research tools and data. Different theoretical and applied research topics were presented, related to research objectives in the CBMM thrusts.

In summary, this meeting provided means for postdocs and students to learn more about real-world and industrial research projects, and the transfer of knowledge and technology from a research lab to production. This meeting also provided means for GE and CBMM participants to learn about the academic research projects and active research areas within CBMM, and consider possible collaborations to leverage from combining advanced research approaches with top industrial development  tools and  data for real-life applications.

Both parties agreed there should be a follow-up to enable future research discussions and collaborations. The CBMM postdoc group will revisit many of the issues mentioned, along with relevant career opportunities in one of the future research meetings.