Seminar
How Computer Vision Helps – from Research to Scale
Abstract: Vasudevan (Vasu) Sundarababu, SVP and Head of Digital Engineering, will cover the topic: ‘How Computer Vision Helps – from Research to Scale’. During his time, Vasu will explore how Computer Vision technology can be leveraged in-market today, the key projects he is currently leading that leverage CV, and the end-to-end lifecycle of a CV initiative - [...]
Motion Matters in the Metaverse
Abstract: Abstract: In the early 1970s, Psychologists investigated biological motion perception by attaching point-lights to the joints of the human body, known as ‘point light walkers’. These early experiments showed biological motion perception to be an extreme example of sophisticated pattern analysis in the brain, capable of easily differentiating human motions with reduced motion cues. Further [...]
What do generative models know about geometry and illumination?
Abstract: Generative models can produce compelling pictures of realistic scenes. Objects are in sensible places, surfaces have rich textures, illumination effects appear accurate, and the models are controllable. These models, such as StyleGAN, can also generate semantically meaningful edits of scenes by modifying internal parameters. But do these models manipulate a purely abstract representation of the [...]
Life as a Professor Seminar
Have you ever wondered what life is like as a professor? What do professors do on a daily basis? What makes the faculty career challenging and rewarding? Maybe you have even thought about becoming a faculty member yourself? Join us on March 22nd from 2:00 - 3:30 PM, where a panel of CMU faculty will [...]
A Constructivist’s Guide to Robot Learning
Over the last decade, a variety of paradigms have sought to teach robots complex and dexterous behaviors in real-world environments. On one end of the spectrum we have nativist approaches that bake in fundamental human knowledge through physics models, simulators and knowledge graphs. While on the other end of the spectrum we have tabula-rasa approaches [...]
Robot Learning by Understanding Egocentric Videos
Abstract: True gains of machine learning in AI sub-fields such as computer vision and natural language processing have come about from the use of large-scale diverse datasets for learning. In this talk, I will discuss if and how we can leverage large-scale diverse data in the form of egocentric videos (first-person videos of humans conducting [...]
Next-Generation Robot Perception: Hierarchical Representations, Certifiable Algorithms, and Self-Supervised Learning
Spatial perception —the robot’s ability to sense and understand the surrounding environment— is a key enabler for robot navigation, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Recent advances in perception algorithms and systems have enabled robots to create large-scale geometric maps of unknown environments and detect objects of interest. Despite these advances, a large gap still separates robot [...]
Autonomous mobility in Mars exploration: recent achievements and future prospects
Abstract: This talk will summarize key recent advances in autonomous surface and aerial mobility for Mars exploration, then discuss potential future missions and technology needs for Mars and other planetary bodies. Among recent advances, the Perseverance rover that is now operating on Mars includes new autonomous navigation capability that dramatically increases its traverse speed over [...]
Structures and Environments for Generalist Agents
Abstract: We are entering an era of highly general AI, enabled by supervised models of the Internet. However, it remains an open question how intelligence emerged in the first place, before there was an Internet to imitate. Understanding the emergence of skillful behavior, without expert data to imitate, has been a longstanding goal of reinforcement [...]
From Videos to 4D Worlds and Beyond
Abstract: Abstract: The world underlying images and videos is 3-dimensional and dynamic, i.e. 4D, with people interacting with each other, objects, and the underlying scene. Even in videos of a static scene, there is always the camera moving about in the 4D world. Accurately recovering this information is essential for building systems that can reason [...]
Mars Robots and Robotics at NASA JPL
Abstract: In this seminar I’ll discuss Mars robots, the unprecedented results we’re seeing with the latest Mars mission, and how we got here. Perseverance’s manipulation and sampling systems have collected samples from unique locations at twice the rate of any prior mission. 88% of all driving has been autonomous. This has enabled the mission to [...]
Generative and Animatable Radiance Fields
Abstract: Generating and transforming content requires both creativity and skill. Creativity defines what is being created and why, while skill answers the question of how. While creativity is believed to be abundant, skill can often be a barrier to creativity. In our team, we aim to substantially reduce this barrier. Recent Generative AI methods have simplified the problem for 2D [...]
Generative modeling: from 3D scenes to fields and manifold
Abstract: In this keynote talk, we delve into some of our progress on generative models that are able to capture the distribution of intricate and realistic 3D scenes and fields. We explore a formulation of generative modeling that optimizes latent representations for disentangling radiance fields and camera poses, enabling both unconditional and conditional generation of 3D [...]
Estimating Robustness using Proxies
ABSTRACT: This talk covers some of our recent explorations on estimating the robustness of black-box machine learning models across data subpopulations. In other words, if a trained model is uniformly accurate across different types of inputs, or if there are significant performance disparities affecting the different subpopulations. Measuring such a characteristic is fairly straightforward if [...]