Ph.D. in Mathematics and Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany (2004)

M.S. in Fluid Dynamics at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2000)

M.S. in Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne, Switzerland (2000)

My main scientific interest is to unravel the mechanisms and computations used by the brain to encode and decode visual information from populations of neurons. I am currently investigating how stimulus parameters, such as the orientation of a drifting grating or the direction of motion of a random dot field, are decoded from the population activity of neurons in areas V1 and MT of the anesthetized macaque cortex. This work is carried out with Prof. J. Anthony Movshon in the Visual Neuroscience Laboratory. In my doctoral dissertation, I applied statistical learning theory to model computer vision (image processing and pattern classification), and psychophysics (algorithms used by humans to process and classify the gender of face images). Other research areas which I have investigated include applied mathematics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, turbomachinery and microfluidics.

My full Curriculum Vitae can be obtained here.

Journal articles

• A.B.A. Graf and J.A. Movshon. Encoding and decoding the direction of motion from neuronal populations in macaque area MT. 2008. In preparation.


• A.B.A. Graf and J.A. Movshon. Direction estimation from populations of neurons in macaque primary visual cortex. 2008. In preparation.


• A.B.A. Graf, A. Kohn, M. Jazayeri, and J.A. Movshon. Decoding neural responses in macaque primary visual cortex. 2007. In preparation.


• A.B.A. Graf, O. Bousquet, G. Rätsch, and B. Schölkopf. Prototype classification: Insights from machine learning. Neural Computation, 2008. In press. [pdf]


• A.B.A. Graf, F.A. Wichmann, H.H. Bülthoff, and B. Schölkopf. Classification of faces in man and machine. Neural Computation, 18:143-165, 2006. [pdf]


• O. Gonzalez, A.B.A. Graf, and J. H. Maddocks. Dynamics of a rigid body in a Stokes fluid. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 519:133-160, 2004. [pdf]


• G. Vogel, A.B.A. Graf, J. von Wolfersdorf, and B. Weigand. A novel transient heater-foil technique for liquid crystal experiments on film cooled surfaces. ASME Journal of Turbomachinery, 125:529-537, 2003. [pdf]


• A.B.A. Graf, A.J. Smola, and S. Borer. Classification in a normalized feature space using Support Vector Machines. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 14(3):597-605, 2003. [pdf]

Reviewed conference proceedings

• F.A. Wichmann, A.B.A. Graf, E.P. Simoncelli, H.H. Bülthoff, and B. Schölkopf. Machine learning applied to perception: Decision images for classification. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 17, pages 1489-1496. MIT Press, 2005. [pdf]


• A.B.A. Graf and F.A. Wichmann. Insights from machine learning applied to human visual classification. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 16, pages 905-912. MIT Press, 2004. [pdf]


• C. Wallraven, B. Caputo, and A.B.A. Graf. Recognition with local features: The kernel recipe. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), volume 2, pages 257-264. IEEE Press, 2003. [pdf]


• A.B.A. Graf and F.A. Wichmann. Gender classification of human faces. In Biologically Motivated Computer Vision (BMCV), LNCS 2525, pages 491-501. Springer, 2002. [pdf]


• H.H. Bülthoff, C. Wallraven, and A.B.A. Graf. View-based dynamic object recognition based on human perception. In IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), volume 3, pages 768-776. IEEE CS Press, 2002. [pdf]


• G. Vogel, A.B.A. Graf, and B. Weigand. Film cooling: A comparative study of different heaterfoil configurations for liquid crystals experiments. In ASME TURBO EXPO, volume GT-2002-30552, 2002. [pdf]


• A.B.A. Graf and S. Borer. Normalization in Support Vector Machines. In Pattern Recognition (DAGM), LNCS 2191, pages 277-282. Springer, 2001. [pdf]

Doctoral dissertation

• A.B.A. Graf. Classification and feature extraction in man and machine. Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 2004. [pdf]