Seminar
Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Zeynep Temel, Kris Kitani, Deva Ramanan, Henny Admoni
Singleton Room, Roberts Engineering Hall
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Life as a Professor Seminar

Singleton Room, Roberts Engineering Hall

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Lerrel Pinto
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Robotics and Machine Learning, New York University

A Constructivist’s Guide to Robot Learning

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Saurabh Gupta
Assistant Professor
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Robot Learning by Understanding Egocentric Videos

GHC 8102

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Luca Carlone
Leonardo Career Development Associate Professor
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Next-Generation Robot Perception: Hierarchical Representations, Certifiable Algorithms, and Self-Supervised Learning

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Dr. Larry Matthies
Technology Coordinator
Mars Exploration Program Office, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California

Autonomous mobility in Mars exploration: recent achievements and future prospects

NSH 4305

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Phillip Isola
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Structures and Environments for Generalist Agents

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Angjoo Kanazawa
Assistant Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
, University of California at Berkeley

From Videos to 4D Worlds and Beyond

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

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 [...]

RI Seminar
Vandi Verma
Deputy Manager
Mobility and Robotics Systems, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Mars Robots and Robotics at NASA JPL

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Sergey Tulyakov
Principal Research Scientist
Snap Inc.

Generative and Animatable Radiance Fields

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Miguel Angel Bautista
Staff Research Scientist
Apple Machine Learning Research

Generative modeling: from 3D scenes to fields and manifold

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Shervin Ardeshir
Senior Research Scientist
Netflix

Estimating Robustness using Proxies

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Or Patashnik
PhD student
Tel-Aviv University

Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: In this talk, I will focus on presenting my recent work which will be presented at CVPR in less than two months. Text-guided image generation has progressed rapidly in recent years, inspiring major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. Recently, it has been shown that using score distillation, one can successfully text-guide a NeRF model to [...]

VASC Seminar

Navigating to Objects in the Real World

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the classical pipeline for spatial navigation, which builds a geometric map using depth sensors and plans to reach point goals. Broadly, end-to-end [...]

VASC Seminar
Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad

Going Beyond Continual Learning: Towards Organic Lifelong Learning

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Supervised learning, the harbinger of machine learning over the last decade, has had tremendous impact across application domains in recent years. However, the notion of a static trained machine learning model is becoming increasingly limiting, as these models are deployed in changing and evolving environments. Among a few related settings, continual learning has gained significant [...]

VASC Seminar
Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Texas at Austin

Predictive Scene Representations for Embodied Visual Search

GHC 6501

Abstract:  My research advances embodied AI by developing large-scale datasets and state-of-the-art algorithms. In my talk, I will specifically focus on the embodied visual search problem, which aims to enable intelligent search for robots and augmented reality (AR) assistants. Embodied visual search manifests as the visual navigation problem in robotics, where a mobile agent must efficiently navigate [...]

Special Talk
Chris Timperley
Senior System Scientist
Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), Carnegie Mellon University

Special RI Seminar

NSH 4305

Title: Testing, Analysis, and Specification for Robust and Reliable Robot Software Abstract: Building robust and reliable robotic software is an inherently challenging feat that requires substantial expertise across a variety of disciplines. Despite that, writing robot software has never been easier thanks to software frameworks such as ROS: At its best, ROS allows newcomers to assemble simple, [...]

VASC Seminar
Aayush Bansal
Startup

Generating Beautiful Pixels

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: In this talk, I will present three experiments that use low-level image statistics to generate high-resolution detailed outputs. In the first experiment, I will use 2D pixels to efficiently mine hard examples for better learning. Simply biasing ray sampling towards hard ray examples enables learning of neural fields with more accurate high-frequency detail in less [...]

VASC Seminar
Viraj Prabhu
CS PhD Student
Georgia Institute of Technology

Towards Reliable Computer Vision Systems

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  The real world has infinite visual variation – across viewpoints, time, space, and curation. As deep visual models become ubiquitous in high-stakes applications, their ability to generalize across such variation becomes increasingly important. In this talk, I will present opportunities to improve such generalization at different stages of the ML lifecycle: first, I will [...]

RI Seminar
Paul Debevec
Chief Research Officer
Eyeline Studios

Transforming Hollywood Visual Effects with Graphics and Vision

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Paul will describe his path to developing visual effects technology used in hundreds of movies, including The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, Benjamin Button, Avatar, Maleficent, Furious 7, and Blade Runner: 2049. These techniques include image-based modeling and rendering, high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, and high-resolution facial scanning for photoreal digital actors. Paul will also [...]

VASC Seminar
Bharath Hariharan
Assistant Professor
Cornell University

Vision without labels

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized all aspects of computer vision, but its successes have come from supervised learning at scale: large models trained on ever larger labeled datasets. However this reliance on labels makes these systems fragile when it comes to new scenarios or new tasks where labels are unavailable. This is in stark contrast to [...]