
Many of this wide-ranging physicist’s thirty-some patents involve neural network technology, and his publications center on statistical analysis of images, machine learning, and neural network optimization. His computer analysis of paintings focus–sorry, but there’s no way to skirt this pun–on the sources and behavior of light in the two-dimensional painting surface and use what the computer "learns" to simulate the fully dimensional world from which the painting was made. Stork posits, for instance, the real-world version of the daylight streaming through the window of the tavern in Caravaggio’s "Calling of Saint Matthew" was actually the glow of a lantern.
Stork’s imaginative detective work seems to be operations research turned inside out: start with the product and work back through to understand the process.