Washington Mio earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1984 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (NYU), and has held postdoctoral positions at NYU, Cornell University, and University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a professor of mathematics and biomathematics at Florida State University. His research interests include pattern analysis, machine learning, geometric topology, and applications to biology, computer vision, and medical imaging. Many of his current research projects are interdisciplinary and have been sponsored by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Army Research Office.
Abstract Washington Mio will begin with a discussion of methodology of shape and network analysis based on spectral geometry, including those based on the spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami operator, the associated fundamental modes, and other properties of diffusion kernels. The methods are rather general and apply to a broad class of shapes such as surfaces and solids in 3D space, meshes, point clouds, as well as complex networks. Also will be discussed various applications to biology, including morphological problems arising in developmental and evolutionary biology, ant nest architecture and protein interaction networks.