Christoph von der Malsburg

Christoph von der Malsburg (born 8 May 1942) is a German physicist and neuroscientist.

Christoph von der Malsburg
Christoph von der Malsburg
Born (1942-05-08) 8 May 1942 (age 82)
NationalityGerman
Alma materUniversity of Heidelberg
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscientist
InstitutionsUniversity of Southern California
ThesisBestimmung der π-Masse (1970)
Doctoral studentsLadan Shams

Early life

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von der Malsburg obtained his PhD with a concentration in elementary particle physics at CERN and the University of Heidelberg in 1970.

Career

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He joined the neurobiology department of the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. He remained there until 1987, when he became a professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, Physics and Psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.[1] In 1990, he founded the Institut für Neuroinformatik (Institute for Neural Computation) at Ruhr-University Bochum, together with Werner von Seelen. He commuted between the two institutions until 2007, when he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies as a Senior Fellow.[2]

Von der Malsburg co-founded two companies and received a number of awards. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Human Brain Project[3] and one of the members of the founding board of Mindfire Foundation, of which he also heads the neuroscience board.[4]

Brain Theory

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His research interests focused on processes of organization in the brain with emphasis on the structure and function of the visual system. His publications concerning the theory of self-organization of regular fiber projections in the visual system made him a pioneer of this field. He is known for his criticism of the theory of neural networks.[5] He claimed that the generally accepted view fails because of the binding problem. To solve it he formulated the Dynamic Link Architecture, a system of rapidly switching network fragments, as applied to facial recognition.[6][7]

Recognition

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  • Pioneer Award 1994 of the Neural Network Council of the IEEE
  • Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation Award 1998
  • Koerber-Award for European Science 2000
  • Hebb Award 2003 of the International Neural Network Society
  • President of the European Neural Network Society from 1995 to 1996
  • Fellow of the International Neural Network Society
  • Co-editor of several journals

References

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  1. ^ Christoph von der Malsburg Professor of Computer Science, Computer Science Department, Biology Department, Department for Physics and Astronomy Director, Laboratory of Computational and Biological Vision Director, Institut für Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany http://ngp.usc.edu/faculty/profile/?fid=29 Archived 2016-05-12 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies: Christoph von der Malsburg
  3. ^ Human Brain Project: Scientific Advisory Board
  4. ^ "Mindfire Foundation: Team". Archived from the original on 2018-08-22. Retrieved 2018-08-22.
  5. ^ Christoph von der Malsburg: The correlation theory of brain function. Internal Report 81-2, MPI Biophysical Chemistry, 1981. http://cogprints.org/1380/1/vdM_correlation.pdf See Reprint in Models of Neural Networks II, chapter 2, pages 95-119. Springer, Berlin, 1994.
  6. ^ P. Wolfrum, C. Wolff, J. Lücke, and C. von der Malsburg. A recurrent dynamic model for correspondence-based face recognition. Journal of Vision 8, 1--18. doi:10.1167/8.7.34, 2008.
  7. ^ Wiscott, L., Fellous, J. M., Krüger, N., and von der Malsburg, C. (July 1997) “Face recognition by elastic bunch graph matching. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19 (7): 775-779. ISSN 0162-8828, doi:10.1109/34.598235