Tamara L. Berg
Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University
1411 Computer Science
Stony Brook, NY 11794
tlberg - at - cs.stonybrook.edu
(646) 509-3361
Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 2:20-3:20 (and by appointment)

Member of the Stony Brook consortium for
Digital Arts, Culture & Technology (cDACT).

  Research

My main research area is Digital Media, specifically focused on organizing large collections of images with associated text through the use of techniques from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Today billions of images with associated text are available in web pages, captioned photographs from news sources, video with speech or closed captioning, and others. In order to organize, search and exploit these enormous collections we have developed methods that combine information from both the visual and textual sources effectively. Past and current projects include: automatically identifying people in news photographs, classifying images from the web, selecting aesthetically pleasing or interesting images, generating natural language descriptions for images, and recognizing the clothing items people are wearing. I am also generally interested in bringing together people and expertise from various areas of Digital Media including digital art, music, and cultural studies.

Bio

I received my B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2001. I then completed a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 under the advisorship of Professor David Forsyth as a member of the Berkeley Computer Vision Group. Afterward, I spent 1 year as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research before joining the Computer Science department at Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor and core member of the consortium for Digital Art, Culture, and Technology (cDACT). My research straddles the boundary between Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing with applications to large scale recognition, retrieval, and social network analysis.

Recent News

  • Are you working on vision and language? Submit a paper to our NAACL-HLT workshop on Vision and Language (WVL)!
  • New NSF IIS-Core Medium grant awarded.
  • New NSF CI-P grant awarded.
  • 2 papers accepted at CVPR 2012.
  • 1 paper accepted at ACL 2012.
  • 1 paper accepted at NAACL 2012.
  • 1 paper accepted at EACL 2012.
  • JHU-CLSP Summer 2011 Workshop webpage with papers and data now available.

Teaching
Spring 2013 - CSE/ISE 364 Advanced Multimedia
Spring 2013 - CSE 590 Computational Photography
Fall 2012 - CSE 595 Words & Pictures
Spring 2012 - CSE/ISE 364 Advanced Multimedia
Spring 2012 - CSE 591 Recognizing People, Objects, and Actions
Fall 2011 - CSE 590 Computational Photography
Spring 2011 - CSE 595 Words & Pictures
Spring 2011 - CSE/ISE 364 Advanced Multimedia
Spring 2010 - CSE/ISE 364 Advanced Multimedia
Fall 2009 - CSE 591 Recognizing People, Objects, and Actions
Spring 2009 - CSE/ISE 364 Advanced Multimedia
Fall 2008 - CSE 690 Internet Vision

Students
Vicente Ordonez (PhD)
Kota Yamaguchi (PhD)
Hadi Kiapour (PhD)
Sirion Vittayakorn (PhD)
Hanyu Liu (MS)
Sebo Kim (Undergrad)

Former Students
Chaitanya Kommini (MS Indepdendent Study) - 2012
Deepak Venkatachalam (MS Independent Study) - 2011
Farheen Noorie (MS Independent Study) - 2011
Girish Kulkarni (MS) - 2011 Epic Systems
Debaleena Chattopadhy (MS) - 2011 Indiana School of Informatics PhD
Sagnik Dhar (MS) 2010 - Honda Research
Visruth Premraj (MS) 2010 Epic Systems
Erin Palmer (MS) 2009 - Factset
Jose Villa (MS) 2010
Piyush Kumat, (MS Indendent Study) Fall 2009

Current Funding

NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program: Award #1054133 - Toward a General Framework for Words & Pictures. Project Page

IIS Core: Award #1161876 - RI: Medium: Integrating Humans and Computers for Image and Video Understanding

CI-P:Collaborative Research Award #1205354 - Visual Entailment data set and challenge for the language and vision communities

Seeing Social: Exploiting Computer Vision in Online Communities. Google Faculty Research Award

SBU/BNL Seed Grant: "The Data Sensorium: Multi-Modal Explorations of Scientific Data". Personel - Dan Weymouth, Kevin Yager, Tamara Berg, Margaret Schedel, Klaus Mueller, Dimitris Samaras, Tony Phillips, Rita Goldstein, Nelly Alia-Klein, Zabet Patterson.

NSF MRI-R2 grant: "Development of an Immersive Giga-pixel Display". Contributor as Senior Personel.

Past Funding
Stony Brook FAHSS grant: "Encountering Data". Daniel Weymouth, Tamara Berg, Zabet Patterson, Margaret Schedel, John Lutterbie.

Stony Brook FAHSS grant: "Hybrid Geographies". Zabet Patterson, Christa Erickson, Margaret Schedel, Tamara Berg, Raiford Guins, Andrew Uroskie.


  Publications

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Alex Berg, my husband.

Arnold Miller, my dad.