Some updates – maybe a little overdue – from Baltimore:
From March until July, I’m on a research visit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland 🇺🇸. I’m working at the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR), under supervision of Prof. Dr. Nassir Navab (as in Munich) and Prof. Dr. Russell H. Taylor. During my stay here, I’m focusing on robotic ultrasound acquisition and visual servoing applications.
A few words regarding the riots on April 27th: I’ve never felt particularly safe in this city, and it’s probably a very good idea to avoid certain neighborhoods completely. So when we heard the news about the violence, the state of emergency, the activation of the national guard, and the curfew, of course we got worried how this will end. Nevertheless, I absolutely see that the Freddie Gray incident was just the last straw and that there seems to be no other way to gain media attention to the underlying problems of Baltimore and this country in general. I can report that the neighborhood around the JHU homewood campus is quite safe, and after the first night, security in the city has pretty much returned to normal again. While I condemn completely pointless looting and arson, I really hope the riot will trigger some positive change.
Edit: This NY Times article sums it up pretty much.
Some good news at the end: I am presenting our work on prostate biopsy guidance
- O. Zettinig, A. Shah, C. Hennersperger, M. Eiber, C. Kroll, H. Kübler, T. Maurer, F. Milletari, J. Rackerseder, C. Schulte zu Berge, E. Storz, B. Frisch, N. Navab. Multimodal Image-Guided Prostate Fusion Biopsy based on Automatic Deformable Registration. 6th International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions – IPCAI 2015, Barcelona (June 2015). accepted.
at the IPCAI conference in Barcelona! Looking forward to many interesting discussions (and also the beach, of course 😉 ). See you there!