Hillman resident up for top science prize

Hillman resident Ajmal Mian has been nominated in the 2012 WA Science awards for his work in 3D face and object recognition in a range of multidisciplinary applications.

Dr Mian works at the University of Western Australian studying computer science and specialises in computer vision, which is the science of giving computers and machines ‘‘intelligence’’.

‘‘People are more familiar with artificial intelligence—computer vision is one branch of artificial intelligence,’’ he said.

‘‘In layman’s (terms), computer vision is about giving eyes and intelligence to a machine.

‘‘The camera is the eye, but what happens once the image is formed behind that, that’s the intelligent part.’’

Currently working on ways to analyse human faces to identify neurological disorders, Dr Mian said it was incredible what computers were capable of if programmed correctly.

‘‘The experimental set-up required for computer vision is very basic—just a camera and a computer, and you can do amazing stuff with it,’’ he said.

‘‘There are a lot of opportunities and there are a lot of disciplines that make use of computers. The main advantage with computers being the flexibility that they offer.’’

‘‘For example, if you have a hardware machine it can only do one task but the computer has everything. You can program it to do anything. That’s why it’s called software, because it can be moulded in any direction.’’