Seminar
Fun with Fluids
Abstract: Visual simulation of fluids has become an indispensable tool for computer graphics. Many fluid phenomena can be simulated by solving Navier-Stokes equations. In computer graphics, the NS equations are mostly used for simulating smoke, water and fire. However, it is useful for other different purposes. In this talk, we show our usage of [...]
Challenges Facing Computational Face
Abstract: Recent advances in computational face research make possible a growing range of scientific, behavioral, and commercial applications. Many companies are focusing on the future of computational face products and services, but number of critical research questions remain to be solved. These include 3D face alignment from 2D image, face analysis under extreme pose variation [...]
Modeling Human Movements for Robotics
Abstract: Creating realistic virtual humans has traditionally been considered a research problem in Computer Animation primarily for entertainment applications. With the recent breakthrough in collaborative robots and deep reinforcement learning, accurately modeling human movements and behaviors has become a common challenge faced by researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, as well as Computer Animation. In this [...]
Don’t forget to have fun
Abstract: I like to think that robots should be rational agents, modeled on human behavior. I teach a course about using optimization to plan over time by maximizing utility. I note that a series of Nobel Prizes in Economics, starting with CMU's own AI pioneer Herb Simon and including one to Daniel Kahneman and this [...]
What Matters for Deformable Object Manipulation
Abstract: Deformable objects such as cables and clothes are ubiquitous in factories, hospitals, and homes. While a great deal of work has investigated the manipulation of rigid objects in these settings, manipulation of deformable objects remains under-explored. The problem is indeed challenging, as these objects are not straightforward to model and have infinite-dimensional configuration spaces, [...]
Bayesian Eigenobjects: A Unified Framework for 3D Robot Perception
Abstract: Robot-object interaction requires several key perceptual building blocks including object pose estimation, object classification, and partial-object completion. These tasks form the perceptual foundation for many higher level operations including object manipulation and world-state estimation. Most existing approaches to these problems in the context of 3D robot perception assume an existing database of objects [...]
Two Tales about Image Classification
Abstract: This talk tells two tales about image-classification systems, both of which are motivated by the real-world deployment of such systems. The first tale introduces a new convolutional neural network architecture, called multi-scale DenseNets, with the ability to adapt dynamically to computational resource limits at inference time. The network uses progressively growing multi-scale convolutions, dense [...]