About Me: I (Ania Mitros) am a Ph.D. graduate student at Caltech, in the CNS (Computation and Neural Systems) department. I am also a member of Christof Koch's lab, more commonly known as Klab. However, I'm living in Seattle and working in Chris Diorio's lab until I finish my thesis. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Rice University and while there was a member of Brown College.

Curriculum Vitae: Available here in PostScript format or here to download the LaTex source and style file. I'm hoping to graduate in June 2005 and will be looking for jobs later that summer. But certainly not before then.

Research Interests: My main research interests lie in electronic circuit design, sensors, vision processing, and neuroscience.

Telluride 2003: I taught the tutorial on floating gate transistors at the 2003 Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop. You can download my slides.

Current Project: Although still a Caltech student (Go Beavers!), I'm working at the lab of Chris Diorio at the University of Washington. I'll eventually write up a more thorough summary, but briefly I'm designing and testing analog VLSI chips. These chips incorporate an array of local image processing elements, each containing a photodiode and some analog circuitry. Floating gates within some of the circuits can be programmed to reduce mismatch. I am interested in using the final chip as a front-end feature detector coupled with a digital post-processor (likely, an FPGA) to solve a task such as self-motion esitimation.

Previous Project: The Vibrating Retina I still believe the concept was good, but due to lack of manpower, it got canned. Sigh. Click the "The Vibrating Retina" link for details. In short, the concept involved a CMOS visual sensor that used vibrations of the image to increase resolution and decrease fixed pattern noise. The concept is analogous to techniques used by some animals to increase the resolution of their limited retinae.

CNS Survey: Titus Brown and I organized and conducted a survey of CNS students and alumni in 2001, just in time for the CNS 15th birthday party. The survey questions and results are available only by password to current and past CNS students, alumni, and faculty. If you do not know the password, email me or Titus Brown.

On Biomorphic Engineering: The terms "biomimetic", "biomorphic", and "neuromorphic" have been applied to engineering designs which look to biology for inspiration, although the degree of loyalty to biological structure varies widely among researchers. A good engineer need be careful in choosing when a biomorphic approach is useful and applicable, and when traditional engineering provides a superior solution.

Copyrights: A few persons have emailed me about writing articles about this research. I'd be happy to have more publicity. But I respectfully ask that: 1) you let me know when/where the writing will be published; 2) Provide me with a pre-print of the article BEFORE it goes into print so that either I or my collaborators can verify that there are no errors; 3) Mention my collaborators (in the case of the Vibrating Retina, Oliver Landolt and Christof Koch); 4) Mention the sponsors, (Vibrating Retina: NSF and DoD); and 5) email me at ania klab.caltech.edu if you have any questions so the work is not misrepresented.

Publications:

• Landolt O., Mitros A. "Visual sensor with resolution enhancement by mechanical vibrations" Autonomous Robots (Nov 2001), 11 (3): 233-239. (PDF format) Initially based on material presented at the Biomorphic Robotics Workshop hosted by JPL at Caltech in 2000 but revised and updated significantly in 2001.
• Landolt O., Mitros A., Koch C. "Visual Sensor with Resolution Enhancement by Mechanical Vibrations" Proceedings 2001 Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI (2001), 249-264. (PDF format)

Publicity: (The New Scientist article is the one to read...)

• New Scientist wrote an article entitled Spiders for Mars about the Vibrating Retina project. In case their link goes down, here's a local copy of the article. I was very impressed with how well they represented the research, without any errors nor extreme glorification. 31 March 2001.
• And then our fame spread, and "bild der wissenschaft" also wrote an article, with a local copy posted here. I've been told it's almost identical to the New Scientist article, but it's in German and I don't know German. 31 March 2001
• Technology Research News followed suit with "Shaky chip makes for bug-eyed bots", with a local copy posted here. April 11, 2001.
• Photonics.com also wrote a decent article in July 2001. Local copy local copy here.