Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507
Bio: Sanja Fidler is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Previously she was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located in the campus of the University of Chicago. She was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto during 2011-2012. She completed her PhD in computer science at University of Ljubljana in 2010, and was a visiting student at UC Berkeley in the final year of her PhD. She is serving as an Area Chair in the upcoming CVPR’16, EMNLP’16 and ACCV’16, and as a Program Chair of 3DV’16. Her main research interests are object recognition, 3D scene understanding, and combining vision and language.

Abstract: A successful autonomous system needs to not only understand the visual world but also communicate its understanding with humans. To make this possible, language can serve as a natural link between high level semantic concepts and low level visual perception. In this talk, I’ll present our recent work in the interdisciplinary domain of vision and language. I’ll show how we can exploit the alignment between movies and books in order to build more descriptive captioning systems. I’ll also discuss our efforts towards automatic understanding of stories behind long and complex videos.