RI Seminar
Systems Scientist
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Robotic Cave Exploration for Search, Science, and Survey

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Robotic cave exploration has the potential to create significant societal impact through facilitating search and rescue, in the fight against antibiotic resistance (science), and via mapping (survey). But many state-of-the-art approaches for active perception and autonomy in subterranean environments rely on disparate perceptual pipelines (e.g., pose estimation, occupancy modeling, hazard detection) that process the same underlying sensor data in [...]

VASC Seminar
Iasonas Kokkinos
Research Manager
Snap Inc, UCL

Humans, hands, and horses: 3D reconstruction of articulated object categories using strong, weak, and self-supervision

Abstract: Reconstructing 3D objects from a single 2D image is a task that humans perform effortlessly,  yet computer vision so far has only robustly solved 3D face reconstruction. In this talk we will see how we can extend the scope of monocular 3D reconstruction to more challenging, articulated categories such as human bodies, hands and [...]

RI Seminar
Thomas Howard
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Rochester

Enabling Grounded Language Communication for Human-Robot Teaming

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract:  The ability for robots to effectively understand natural language instructions and convey information about their observations and interactions with the physical world is highly dependent on the sophistication and fidelity of the robot’s representations of language, environment, and actions.  As we progress towards more intelligent systems that perform a wider range of tasks in a [...]

VASC Seminar
Alex Schwing
Assistant Professor
University of Illinois

Looking behind the Seen in Order to Anticipate

Abstract: Despite significant recent progress in computer vision and machine learning, personalized autonomous agents often still don’t participate robustly and safely across tasks in our environment. We think this is largely because they lack an ability to anticipate, which in turn is due to a missing understanding about what is happening behind the seen, i.e., [...]

RI Seminar
Matthew Walter
Assistant Professor
Robot Intelligence through Perception Lab (RIPL), Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Robots that Learn through Language

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Advances in perception have been integral to transitioning robots from machines restricted to factory automation to autonomous agents that operate robustly in unstructured environments. As our surrogates, robots enable people to explore the deepest depths of the ocean and distant regions of space, making discoveries that would otherwise be impossible. The age of robots [...]

RI Seminar
Assistant Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Towards Reconstructing Any Object in 3D

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: The world we live in is incredibly diverse, comprising of over 10k natural and man-made object categories. While the computer vision community has made impressive progress in classifying images from such diverse categories, the state-of-the-art 3D prediction systems are still limited to merely tens of object classes.  A key reason for this stark difference [...]

VASC Seminar
Serena Yeung
Assistant Professor
Stanford University

The Clinician’s AI Partner: Augmenting Clinician Capabilities Across the Spectrum of Healthcare

Abstract: Clinicians often work under highly demanding conditions to deliver complex care to patients. As our aging population grows and care becomes increasingly complex, physicians and nurses are now also experiencing feelings of burnout at unprecedented levels. In this talk, I will discuss possibilities for computer vision to function as a partner to clinicians, and to augment their capabilities, across [...]

RI Seminar
Siddharth Srivastava
Assistant Professor
School of Computing, Informatics, & Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University

The Unusual Effectiveness of Abstractions for Assistive AI

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Can we balance efficiency and reliability while designing assistive AI systems? What would such AI systems need to provide? In this talk I will present some of our recent work addressing these questions. In particular, I will show that a few fundamental principles of abstraction are surprisingly effective in designing efficient and reliable AI [...]

VASC Seminar
Judy Hoffman
Assistant Professor
College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Reliable and Accessible Visual Recognition

Abstract: As visual recognition models are developed across diverse applications; we need the ability to reliably deploy our systems in a variety of environments. At the same time, visual models tend to be trained and evaluated on a static set of curated and annotated data which only represents a subset of the world. In this [...]

VASC Seminar
Tadas Baltrusaitis
Principal Scientist
Microsoft, Mixed Reality Cambridge

Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone

Abstract: In this seminar I will demonstrate how synthetic data alone can be used to perform face-related computer vision in the wild. The community has long enjoyed the benefits of synthesizing training data with graphics, but the domain gap between real and synthetic data has remained a problem, especially for human faces. Researchers have tried [...]