Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Silvio Savarese is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2005, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2005 – 2008 as a Beckman Institute Fellow. He is recipient of a TWR Automotive Endowed Research Award in 2012, an NSF Career Award in 2011 and Google Research Award in 2010. In 2002 he was awarded the Walker von Brimer Award for outstanding research initiative. He served as workshops chair and area chair in CVPR 2010, and as area chair in ICCV 2011. He will be an area chair in CVPR 2013. His research interests include computer vision, object recognition and scene understanding, activity recognition, shape representation and reconstruction, human visual perception and visual psychophysics.

Abstract: In this talk I will introduce a novel paradigm for jointly addressing two fundamental problems in computer vision: 3D reconstruction and object recognition. Most of the state-of-the-art methods deal with these two tasks separately. Methods for object recognition typically describe the scene as a list of object class labels, but are unable to account for their 3D spatial organization. Most of the approaches for 3D scene modeling produce accurate metric reconstructions but are unable to infer the semantic content of their components. A major line of work from my lab in recent years is to explore methodologies that seek to fill this gap and to coherently describe objects and object components while simultaneously integrating their 3D spatial arrangement in the scene’s physical space. This research is relevant to many application areas such as autonomous navigation, robotics, automatic 3D modeling of urban environments and surveillance.