Faculty Candidate

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, [...]

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 [...]

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

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

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]