VASC Seminar
Rika Antonova
Postdoctoral Scholar
Stanford University

Enabling Self-sufficient Robot Learning

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract:  Autonomous exploration and data-efficient learning are important ingredients for helping machine learning handle the complexity and variety of real-world interactions. In this talk, I will describe methods that provide these ingredients and serve as building blocks for enabling self-sufficient robot learning. First, I will outline a family of methods that facilitate active global exploration. [...]

RI Seminar
David Fouhey
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan

Understanding the Physical World from Images

1305 Newell Simon Hall

If I show you a photo of a place you have never been to, you can easily imagine what you could do in that picture. Your understanding goes from the surfaces you see to the ones you know are there but cannot see, and can even include reasoning about how interaction would change the scene. [...]

VASC Seminar
Vasudevan (Vasu) Sundarababu
SVP & Head of Digital Engineering
Centific

How Computer Vision Helps – from Research to Scale

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

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 - [...]

VASC Seminar
Rachel McDonnell
Associate Professor
Creative Technologies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Motion Matters in the Metaverse

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

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 [...]

VASC Seminar
Anand Bhattad
PhD candidate
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

What do generative models know about geometry and illumination?

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

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 [...]

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 [...]