Present Occupation (Mpeg-film), aka "Will he live a normal life? No, he will be an engineer...":

From 1996 to 1999 I worked with remote sensing and image processing at former Satellitbild (now a branch of the Swedish National Land Survey) in the winter town of Kiruna. In 1999 I moved to Stockholm and spent two years at Carlstedt Research & Technology as a consultant. In 2001 I started to work with face tracking at SmartEye, a spin-off company from CR&T. Working with real-time tracking and pattern recognition has been a challenge and great fun, but all good things come to an end and I am now working with sensor fusion, signal processing, and manned and unmanned aerial aircraft (UAV:s) for Saab. Here is a detailed CV.

Short background:

• B.Sc. in physics from Uppsala University, 1986 (theoretical physics and astronomy).

• 6 months as an exchange student at Sussex University, spring 1985. Project work in Kaluza Klein Theory - manual tensor crunching that Mathematica or Maple would do better and with less mistakes - and an essay on black holes. For what it's worth, I've made a rough digital version of the kaluza-klein document here, typed on my cousin Neil's typewriter 1985, complete with spelling (and possibly conceptual) mistakes.

• Programmer at the department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Akademiska Sjukhuset, Uppsala. Various programming tasks and numerical analysis (1985-1986).

• Ph.D. student at the Onsala Space Observatory (1986-1988).

• Ph.D. thesis (1994) at the department of Signals and Systems (formerly called Applied Electronics) , Chalmers University of Technology. Teaching in analog/digital signal processing, doctorate work on a system for automatic delineation of large scale objects in medical images, involving computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and AI methods. The thesis topic was a system for automatic segmentation, applied to ultrasound and gamma camera images of the heart. The image was represented as a resolution pyramid with feature vectors at every resolution element (pixel), the most useful image primitive being "blobs", or inflated local minima/maxima. The blobs were labeled with a relaxation labeling procedure, and pruned according to size, context and proximity to promiment edges. A top-level scheduler (really a finite state machine) was used in a processing and evaluation cycle to yield the most consistent scene interpretation. The blobs were "inflated" using a gray-scale based medial axis transform to yield the final result on a coarse resolution level. All models - scene and process model - were exchangeable and three different types (CAT and gamma camera images) of medical imagery were tested. Parts of the thesis available here (rar-archive with pdf-files).

• Post doc position at KFA, Jülich, Germany with Frank Pasemann and his group (ATÖ). I Spent most of the time learning about neurobiology of vision and made some tests of Frank's (now at the evolutionary robotics group at the Fraunhofer institute ) ideas on multilayered feed-forward neural networks. Frank's group also included Ulf Dieckmann (mathematical ecology) and Michael Eisele (at Columbia University, N.Y.) who is interested in modelling neuronal pathways mechanism in the brain. See a lecture on directional selectivity (power point presentation). Last, but not least, Nico Stollenwerk who first introduced me to computational methods of chaos theory and who now works with theoretical epidemology.
  

• Stipends from Hellmuth Hertz Foundation and the Technical Research Council (now Vetenskapsrådet) for one year's stay at Inria, Sophia Antipolis, north of Antibes on the Riviera. I Learned about Unix and C++ and became a "tourist" in areas such as artificial life, blackboard systems, watershedding algorithms at the PASTIS project, as of 1997 replaced by the ARIANA project. Listed in the Marquis who is who" 2007.
  

Selected References:

• Molander S. & Broman H., Gustavsson T. (1991): "A controllable Medial Axis Transform", Proceedings of the society for automated image analysis (now SSBA), Linköping, 6-7 March, pp. 240-243.

• Molander S. & Broman H. (1993):"Knowledge-based segmentation and state-based control in image analysis: two examples from the biomedical domain", Signal Processing (Elsevier), special issue on intelligent systems for signal and image understanding, Vol. 32, Nos 1-2., May, pp. 201-215.

• Molander S. (1995):"Blob analysis of biomedical image sequences: a model-based and an inductive approach", proceedings of the summer school in Huddinge (ed. Stig Andersson) Analysis of Dynamical and Cognitive Systems, Aug. 9-14 1993, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer verlag, Vol. 888,, pp. 169-187.

• Molander S. (1994): "What is lacking in today's vision systems?", Proceedings of the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSAB), Halmstads, March, 8-9, pp. 13-17.

• Alfredsson J.,Lundqvist A.,Molander S., Nordlund P-J (2010):"Decision Support for the Gripen NG Aircraft and Beyond". Proc. ICAS, Nice, 19-24 September

Personals

I enjoy Telemark (or free heel) skiing, "långfärsskridskor" long distance skating (5 Mb movie) on lakes. I can recommend a great little book called "Östergötlands bästa skridskovatten", written by a colleague and published by Calazo (I especially recommend page 82). A also enjoy visiting friends abroad, the art of M.C. Escher and the french painter/architect Georges Point, who paints in a style that might be labeled "architectural impressionism". Some examples of his lithographs are shown here, taken from a suite called "Portkosme" featuring motifs with buildings, harbours, and the sea, all done in wonderful pastellike colours. Nowadays you can also find posters from e.g. this place.
I'm an ardent reader of Fantastic Literature (Sci-Fi is a misnomer I think), the list of writers and books I enjoy is far too long to be given here. An example of a great book in this genre is Neal Stephenson's "Anathem", a book full of references to philosophy, science, religion and atheism (my camp). I find contemporary Swedish literature bloodless and introvert, with notable exceptions like Björn Larsson and Carl-Johan Vallgen, who actually have interesting stories to tell. Pick up "John Long Silver" and "Dokument rörande Spelaren Rubashov" and you know what I mean.
I am a fan of the films by Robert Guédiguian whose films have a social pathos rarely seen on the screen today. Often filmed around and in Marseille the topics range from warm comedies (Marie-Jo Et Ses Deux Amours) to disillusioned people who struggle to make a change in society (Mon Père Est Ingénieur). The same goes for Agnès Jaoui, French actress and director whose films also stand out. For those of you who want to avoid the news noise in today's media, I can recommend the swedish periodical Axess, partly available in the internet and in English. I recently discovered Seed magazine and the related Phylotaxis site; highly recommended! I recently discovered the English music group Stereolab, if you like Velvet Underground, pop from the 60:ies and Acid Jazz you'll love this group. I'm also a big fan of Nick Cave, whose music is welcome contrast to the industrially produced music you hear in TV and radio nowadays (which is why I stick to radiostations and films on the internet).

NEWS The results from the National Geographic Genomic project are here. It turns out I belong to the "I" Haplogroup, very common in Scandinavia (no surprise) and my ancestors came into Europe about 21-28.000 years ago (the M89 Middle Eastern Clan). My great-great... ..(800 generations)..grandfather might have carved the famous voluptous female venus figurine.