Faculty Candidate
Berk Calli
PostDoctoral Associate
GRAB Lab , Yale University

Faculty Candidate Talk: Closing the Loop with Vision Feedback and Compliance in Robotic Manipulation

Gates 6115

Areas of Interest: Grasping and Manipulation   Abstract Robotic manipulation is a key functional requirement that is largely missing from the current state of the art regarding robots in unstructured environments. While models of manipulation phenomenon give us invaluable insights on various principles, many parameters (e.g. surface geometry, friction coefficients, contact locations) are difficult to [...]

Faculty Candidate
Changliu Liu
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University

Faculty Candidate Talk: Designing Robot Behavior in Human-Robot Interactions

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Areas of Interest: Industrial Collaborative Robot, Autonomous Driving, Non-Convex Optimization, Distributed Conflict Resolution   Abstract Human-robot interactions (HRI) have been recognized to be a key element of future robots in many application domains such as manufacturing, transportation, service and entertainment, which entail huge social and economic impacts. Technically, it is challenging to design the behavior [...]

Faculty Candidate
Wenzhen Yuan
PhD candidate
Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Faculty Candidate Talk: Making sense of the physical world with high-resolution tactile sensing

Gates 6115

Areas of Interest: Robotic Tactile Sensing, Robotic Perception   Abstract: With the rapid progress in robotics, people expect robots to be able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks in the real world, such as working in factories, performing household chores, and caring for elderly. However, it is still very difficult for robots to act [...]

Faculty Candidate
Zeynep Temel
Postdoctoral Research Associate
SEAS & Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University

Faculty Candidate Talk: Extreme Motions in Natural and Synthetic Systems

GHC 8102

Areas of Interest: Extreme motions of small-scale natural and synthetic systems   Abstract: Small organisms can achieve extraordinary accelerations, speeds, and forces repeatedly throughout their lifespan with minimal costs. For example, bacteria can effectively swim in low Reynolds number environments, rotating their flagella at 100 Hz; mantis shrimp break clam shells with a single strike, [...]

Faculty Candidate
Naomi Fitter
Postdoctoral Scholar,
USC

Faculty Candidate Talk: Design and Evaluation of Everyday Interactive Robots

Gates 6115

Areas of Interest: Human-Computer Interaction and Robotics Host: Aaron Steinfeld Admin Contact: Peggy Martin pm1e@andrew.cmu.edu   As robots appear in more everyday environments, they will have new opportunities to enhance the lives of the people around them. Despite this potential gain, modern robots lack many of the necessary skills to effectively interact with people. In particular, almost all [...]

Faculty Candidate
David Braun
Assistant Professor (PI)
Dynamics & Control Laboratory, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Faculty Candidate: David Braun

GHC 6115

Areas of interest: Robotics, Optimal Control, System Dynamics, Impedance Control, Variable Impedance Actuators Host: Hartmut Geyer Admin Contact: Keyla Cook keylac@andrew.cmu.edu

Faculty Candidate
Ling-Qi Yan
PhD candidate
EECS, UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate: Ling-Qi Yan

GHC 6115

Areas of Interest: Physically-based rendering, appearance modeling, molumetric scattering, light transport algorithms, sampling & reconstruction theory Host: Srinivasa Narasimhan Admin Contact: Nora Kazour nkazour@andrew.cmu.edu

Faculty Candidate
Pulkit Agrawal
PhD candidate
Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate: Computational Sensorimotor Learning

NSH 3305

Areas of Interest: Artificial Intelligence Host: Abhinav Gupta Admin Contact: Chris Downey cdowney@andrew.cmu.edu     Abstract: An open question in artificial intelligence is how to endow agents with common sense knowledge that humans naturally seem to possess. A prominent theory in child development posits that human infants gradually acquire such knowledge by the process of experimentation. [...]

Faculty Candidate
Alessandro Roncone
Postdoctoral Scholar
Social Robotics Lab, Yale University

Faculty Candidate: Designing interactive algorithms for human-robot collaboration

NSH 3305

Areas of Interest: Robot control, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence Abstract:   We are on the cusp of a fundamental revolution in how robotics at large will be consumed by and assimilated into our everyday life. In the next decade, state of the art robot platforms will become easier to deploy, more accessible to purchase, and [...]

Faculty Candidate
Judy Hoffman
Computer Science Postdoctoral Researcher
UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate Talk: Adaptive Adversarial Learning for a Diverse Visual World

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Areas of Interest: Computer vision and machine learning Abstract Automated visual recognition is in increasingly high demand. However, despite tremendous performance improvement in recent years, state-of-the-art deep visual models learned using large-scale benchmark datasets still fail to generalize to the diverse visual world. In this talk I will discuss a general purpose semi-supervised learning algorithm, [...]

Faculty Candidate
Cathy Wu
PhD candidate
EECS, BAIR Lab, BDD, UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate: Mixed-autonomy mobility: scalable learning and optimization

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Areas of Interest: Learning, optimization, and control for mixed-autonomy mobility Abstract: How will self-driving cars change urban mobility? This talk describes contributions in machine learning and optimization critical for enabling mixed-autonomy mobility, the gradual and complex integration of automated vehicles into the existing transportation system. The talk first explores and quantifies the potential impact of [...]

Faculty Candidate
Manolis Savva
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Graphics Lab, Vision Lab, CS Department, Princeton University

Faculty Candidate: Human-centric Understanding of 3D Environments

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Areas of Interest: Human-centric 3D Scene Analysis, Scene synthesis for 3D content creation and learning through simulation, Data visualization   Abstract: Creating 3D environments is hard. Experts spend much time and effort using complex software to create virtual 3D interiors. This 3D content creation bottleneck limits the use of virtual environments for applications in entertainment, [...]

Faculty Candidate
David Fouhey
Postdoctoral Fellow,
EECS Department,, UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate: Recovering a Functional and Three Dimensional Understanding of Images

NSH 3305

Areas of Interest: 3D Vision Abstract: What does it mean to understand an image? One common answer in computer vision has been that understanding means naming things: this part of the image corresponds to a refrigerator and that to a person, for instance. While important, the ability to name is not enough: humans can effortlessly [...]

Faculty Candidate
Katie Bouman
Postdoctoral Fellow
Event Horizon Telescope

Faculty Candidate: Katie Bouman

Gates 6115

Areas of Interest: Computational imaging, computational photography, computer vision, image and video processing, inverse problems, machine learning Host: Srinivasa Narasimhan Admin Contact: jessb@andrew.cmu.edu

Faculty Candidate
Long Wang
PhD candidate
Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University

Faculty Candidate: Toward Semi-Autonomous Surgical Tasks using Continuum Robots: Modeling, Calibration, and Intelligent Assistance

GHC 6115

Abstract: Continuum robots for surgical applications can support complex surgical tasks within deep confined spaces of the body. Such surgical paradigms often present surgeons with sensory and surgical scene interpretation challenges that diminish situational awareness. These robots can reach deep into the body, while in some scenarios, using them in a semi-automated mode of operation [...]

Faculty Candidate
Adriana Schultz
PhD candidate
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT

Faculty Candidate Talk: Computational Design for the Next Manufacturing Revolution

Gates 6115

Areas of interest: Computational design for manufacturing Abstract: Over the next few decades, we are going to transition to a new economy where highly complex, customizable products are manufactured on demand by flexible robotic systems. In many fields, this shift has already begun. 3D printers are revolutionizing production of metal parts in the aerospace, automotive, [...]

Faculty Candidate
Saurabh Gupta
PhD candidate
Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate Talk: Visual Perception and Navigation in 3D Scenes

GHC 8102

Abstract: In recent times, computer vision has made great leaps towards 2D understanding of sparse visual snapshots of the world. This is insufficient for robots that need to exist and act in the 3D world around them based on a continuous stream of multi-modal inputs. In this talk, I will present some of my efforts in bridging this gap between computer vision and robotics. I will show [...]

Faculty Candidate
Matt O'Toole
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow
Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Faculty Candidate: Probing Light Transport for 3D Shape

GHC 6115

Abstract: There is a rising demand for high-performance 3D sensors in response to the rapid development of autonomous cars, 3D printers, and virtual/augmented reality systems.  These sensors often make use of controllable light sources to send light signals into an environment, and cameras to measure the signal reflected back in response.  This approach can, however, fail [...]

Faculty Candidate
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Social Signal Processing: A Computational Approach to Sensing, Reconstructing and Understanding Social Interaction

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: Humans convey their thoughts, emotions, and intentions through a concert of social displays: voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and body posture. Despite advances in machine perception technology, machines are unable to discern the subtle and momentary nuances that carry so much of the information and context of human communication. The encoding of conveyed information [...]

Faculty Candidate
Petter Nilsson
Postdoctoral Scholar,
Aaron Ames group, CalTech

Faculty Candidate: Petter Nilsson

GHC 6115

Areas of Interest: Improving design practices and advancing the capabilities of autonomous systems Host: Stephen Smith Admin Contact: Keyla Cook keylac@andrew.cmu.edu

Faculty Candidate
Assistant Research Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Multimodal Computational Behavior Understanding

Emotions influence our lives. Observational methods of measuring affective behavior have yielded critical insights, but a persistent barrier to their wide application is that they are labor-intensive to learn and to use. An automated system that can quantify and synthesize human affective behavior in real-world environments would be a transformational tool for research and for [...]

Faculty Candidate
Systems Scientist
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Faster, Safer, Smaller: The future of autonomy needs all three

Gates-Hillman Center 8102

Abstract In this talk I will start with state estimation as my PhD work. Very often, state estimation plays a crucial role in a robotic system serving as a building block for autonomy. Challenges are to carry out state estimation in 6-DOF, in real-time at high frequencies, with high precision, robust to aggressive motion and [...]

Faculty Candidate
Yuke Zhu
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University

Faculty Candidate: Yuke Zhu

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Talk: Closing the perception-action loop Abstract: Robots and autonomous systems have been playing a significant role in the modern economy. Custom-built robots have remarkably improved productivity, operational safety, and product quality. However, these robots are usually programmed for specific tasks in well-controlled environments, unable to perform diverse tasks in the real world. In this talk, I will [...]

Faculty Candidate
Deepak Pathak
Ph.D. candidate
Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Self-Directed Learning

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: Generalization, i.e., the ability to adapt to novel scenarios, is the hallmark of human intelligence. While we have systems that excel at recognizing objects, cleaning floors, playing complex games and occasionally beating humans, they are incredibly specific in that they only perform the tasks they are trained for and are miserable at generalization. In [...]

Faculty Candidate
Jiajun Wu
Ph.D. student
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning to see the physical world

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: Human intelligence is beyond pattern recognition. From a single image, we're able to explain what we see, reconstruct the scene in 3D, predict what's going to happen, and plan our actions accordingly. In this talk, I will present our recent work on physical scene understanding---building versatile, data-efficient, and generalizable machines that learn to see, reason about, and interact [...]

Faculty Candidate
Jun-Yan Zhu
Postdoctoral Researcher
MIT CSAIL

Learning to Synthesize Images

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Abstract: People are avid consumers of visual content. Every day, we watch videos, play games, and share photos on social media. However, there is an asymmetry – while everybody is able to consume visual content, only a chosen few (e.g., painters, sculptors, film directors) are talented enough to express themselves visually. For example, in modern [...]

Faculty Candidate
Angjoo Kanazawa
BAIR postdoctoral researcher
UC Berkeley

Faculty Candidate: Angjoo Kanazawa

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Title: Perceiving Humans in the 3D World Abstract: Since the dawn of civilization, we have functioned in a social environment where we spend our days interacting with other humans. As we approach a society where intelligent systems and humans coexist, these systems must also interpret and interact with humans that reside in the 3D world. [...]

Faculty Candidate
Abe Davis
Postdoctoral Researcher
Stanford University

Augmenting Imagination: Capturing, Modeling, and Exploring the World Through Video

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Abstract: Cameras offer a rich and ubiquitous source of data about the world around us, providing many opportunities to explore new computational approaches to real-world problems. In this talk, I will show how insights from art, science, and engineering can help us connect progress in visual computing with typically non-visual problems in other domains, allowing [...]

Faculty Candidate
Matthias Niessner
Professor
Visual Computing Lab, Technical University of Munic

AI-Driven Videos Synthesis and its Implications

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Abstract: In this talk, I will present my research vision in how to create photo-realistic digital replica of the real world, and how to make holograms become a reality. Eventually, I would like to see photos and videos evolve to become interactive, holographic content indistinguishable from the real world. Imagine taking such 3D photos to [...]

Faculty Candidate
Angela Dai
Postdoctoral Fellow
Technical University of Munich

Understanding 3D Scans

Gates Hillman Center 6115

Abstract: With recent developments in both commodity range sensors as well as mixed reality devices, capturing and creating 3D models of the world around us has become increasingly important. As the world around us lives in a three-dimensional space, such 3D models will not only facilitate capture and display for content creation but also provide [...]

Faculty Candidate
Systems Scientist
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty Candidate: Wenshan Wang

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Title: Towards General Autonomy: Learning from Simulation, Interaction, and Demonstration Abstract: Today's autonomous systems are still brittle in challenging environments or rely on designers to anticipate all possible scenarios to respond appropriately. On the other hand, leveraging machine learning techniques, robot systems are trained in simulation or the real world for various tasks. Due to [...]