Abstract: Despite decades of progress, machines remain intelligent tools rather than collaborative partners in individual human enterprise. A key reason is that machine perception of inter-personal communication is largely unsolved and a computationally accessible representation of such behavior remains elusive. In this talk, I will describe our research arc over the past decade at CMU to make human signaling a perceptible channel of information for machines. This research includes the construction of the Panoptic Studio, a multisensor facility designed to capture social behavior, and the development of Open Pose, a realtime 2D pose estimation approach whose demo you may have encountered on the fourth floor of NSH. I will share recent progress in moving from the lab to the real world and discuss futures in this research expedition.

Brief Bio: Yaser Sheikh is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He also directs the Facebook Reality Lab in Pittsburgh, which is devoted to achieving photorealistic social interactions in AR and VR. His research broadly focuses on machine perception and rendering of social behavior, spanning sub-disciplines in computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. With colleagues and students, he has won the Honda Initiation Award (2010), Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” Award, best student paper award at CVPR (2018), best paper awards at WACV (2012), SAP (2012), SCA (2010), ICCV THEMIS (2009), best demo award at ECCV (2016), and he received the Hillman Fellowship for Excellence in Computer Science Research (2004). Yaser has served as a senior committee member at leading conferences in computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics including SIGGRAPH (2013, 2014), CVPR (2014, 2015, 2018), ICRA (2014, 2016), ICCP (2011), and served as an Associate Editor of CVIU. His research has been featured by various media outlets including The New York Times, BBC, MSNBC, Popular Science, and in technology media such as WIRED, The Verge, and New Scientist.

Host: Srinivasa Narasimhan

Point of Contact: Stephanie Matvey (smatvey@andrew.cmu.edu)