VASC Seminar
Or Patashnik
Graduate Student
School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University

Leveraging StyleGAN for Image Editing and Manipulation

Abstract: StyleGAN has recently been established as the state-of-the-art unconditional generator, synthesizing images of phenomenal realism and fidelity, particularly for human faces. With its rich semantic space, many works have attempted to understand and control StyleGAN’s latent representations with the goal of performing image manipulations. To perform manipulations on real images, however, one must learn to [...]

RI Seminar
Sebastian Scherer & Matthew Travers
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Resilient Exploration in SubT Environments: Team Explorer’s Approach and Lessons Learned in the Final Event

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Subterranean robot exploration is difficult with many mobility, communications, and navigation challenges that require an approach with a diverse set of systems, and reliable autonomy. While prior work has demonstrated partial successes in addressing the problem, here we convey a comprehensive approach to address the problem of subterranean exploration in a wide range of [...]

VASC Seminar
Soumyadip Sengupta
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of Washington

Next-Gen Video Communication

Abstract: Video communication connects our world. It is necessary in conducting business, educational and personal activities across different geographical locations. However, the quality of an average user’s video communication is dramatically worse than that of professionally created videos in news broadcasts, talk shows, and on YouTube. This is because professionally created videos are often captured with [...]

VASC Seminar
Robert Collins
Associate Professor
Penn State University

Activity Understanding of Scripted Performances

Abstract: The PSU Taichi for Smart Health project has been doing a deep-dive into vision-based analysis of 24-form Yang-style Taichi (TaijiQuan). A key property of Taichi, shared by martial arts katas and prearranged form exercises in other sports, is practice of a scripted routine to build both mental and physical competence.  The scripted nature of routines [...]

VASC Seminar
Vishal Patel
Associate Professor
Johns Hopkins University

Domain adaptive object detection

Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have led to the development of accurate and efficient models for object detection. However, learning highly accurate models relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. Due to this, model performance drops drastically when evaluated on label-scarce datasets having visually distinct images.  Domain adaptation tries to mitigate this degradation.  In [...]

VASC Seminar
Umberto Michieli
Postdoctoral Researcher and Adjunct Professor
University of Padua

Visual Understanding across Semantic Groups, Domains and Devices

Abstract: Deep neural networks often lack generalization capabilities to accommodate changes in the input/output domain distributions and, therefore, are inherently limited by the restricted visual and semantic information contained in the original training set. In this talk, we argue the importance of the versatility of deep neural architectures and we explore it from various perspectives.   [...]

RI Seminar
Stefanos Nikolaidis
Assistant Professor
Computer Science, University of Southern California

Towards Robust Human-Robot Interaction: A Quality Diversity Approach

Abstract: The growth of scale and complexity of interactions between humans and robots highlights the need for new computational methods to automatically evaluate novel algorithms and applications. Exploring the diverse scenarios of interaction between humans and robots in simulation can improve understanding of complex human-robot interaction systems and avoid potentially costly failures in real-world settings. [...]

VASC Seminar
Chao Chen
Assistant Professor
Stony Brook University

Topology-Driven Learning for Biomedical Imaging Informatics

Abstract: Thanks to decades of technology development, we are now able to visualize in high quality complex biomedical structures such as neurons, vessels, trabeculae and breast tissues. We need innovative methods to fully exploit these structures, which encode important information about underlying biological mechanisms. In this talk, we explain how topology, i.e., connected components, handles, loops, [...]

RI Seminar
Professor / Director of RI
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Lessons from the Field: Deep Learning and Machine Perception for field robots

Abstract: Mobile robots now deliver vast amounts of sensor data from large unstructured environments. In attempting to process and interpret this data there are many unique challenges in bridging the gap between prerecorded data sets and the field. This talk will present recent work addressing the application of machine learning techniques to mobile robotic perception. [...]

VASC Seminar
Gianfranco Doretto
Associate Professor
West Virginia University

Learning generative representations for image distributions

Abstract: Autoencoder neural networks are an unsupervised technique for learning representations, which have been used effectively in many data domains. While capable of generating data, autoencoders have been inferior to other models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN’s) in their ability to generate image data. We will describe a general autoencoder architecture that addresses this limitation, and [...]