Contact
Graduate Center for Vision Research,
SUNY College of Optometry
33 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036
Phone: +1 212 938-5542; Lab: +1 212 938-5756;
Fax: +1 212 938-5537
Email: qz@sunyopt.edu
I went to college to study economics, but shifted to
mathematics (probability and measure theory).
In graduate school at the University of Chicago I did
research
on the
retinal and pre-retinal processes of color vision, and in my post-doc
at Bell
Labs I worked on cortical mechanisms of color induction. Since then my
interests have shifted to the cues and strategies used in visual
inferences,
and to neural decoding problems. At present, I have two main research
projects
each funded by an NEI grant. The first concerns the perception of
three-dimensional shapes, and includes work on heuristics, prior
assumptions,
and the physical information contained in contour, texture and motion
cues. The
second concerns color perception in natural settings, and includes work
on
heuristics-based algorithms for color constancy, and on the geometrical
structure of color representation. I also work on motion perception in
complex
configurations.
A good deal of my teaching has been on the neural analysis
of psychological issues. At Columbia University I used to teach an
undergraduate lecture class on the neural mechanisms of perception,
learning,
memory and motor control. I have taught graduate seminars on
computational
approaches to visual perception, both at Columbia and at SUNY. Lately,
I have
been thinking about putting a class together on visual imagination. I
have been
reading intensely about, and collecting case studies on, successful
uses of visual
(geometric) imagination to solve mathematical and scientific problems.