Event Location: NSH 1507
Bio: Ivan Laptev is a full-time researcher in the WILLOW team at INRIA Paris and Ecole Normale Superieure. He has received his PhD in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in 2004 and his Master of Science degree from the same institute in 1997. He has been a research assistant at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) during 1997-1999 and he has joined INRIA in 2004. Ivan’s main research interests concern visual understanding of dynamic scenes including recognition of human actions, scenes, objects and interactions. Ivan has published over 40 papers at international conferences and journals on computer vision, he serves as an associate editor of International Journal of Computer Vision and Image and Vision Computing Journal, he was an area chair for CVPR 2010, ICCV 2011, ECCV 2012 and CVPR 2013. He is a winner of the ERC junior grant in 2012.

Abstract: Action recognition is a vivid research area with many potential applications. In this talk I will briefly review the history of action recognition and will highlight a few of the currently best performing methods. I will then try to take a critical view and will discuss the problem definition as well as the relation of action recognition to other visual recognition tasks. I will argue that our future algorithms, to be more practical, should probably be more person-centric and should analyze scenes and objects in terms of their function, i.e. what people can do and typically do with them. I will end with showing our on-going work in this direction.