RI Seminar
Ren Ng, Ph.D.
Founder & Executive Chairman, Lytro

Lytro – Light Field Cameras, Entrepreneurship and the Future of Photography

Event Location: Disney Research Pittsburgh, CIC Building, Lower Level, Tomorrowland Conference RoomBio: Ren Ng is the founder of Lytro, and developed the underlying technology during graduate school. Ren's Ph.D. research on light field technology won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and Stanford University’s Arthur Samuel Award. Ren's leadership of Lytro has also earned him a [...]

RI Seminar
Jaydev P. Desai
Director, RAMS Laboratory
Member, Maryland Robotics Center, Institute for Systems Research
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Maryland

Towards Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery Under Continuous MRI

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dr. Jaydev P. Desai is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a Member of the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). Prior to joining UMCP, he was an Associate Professor at Drexel University. He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian [...]

VASC Seminar
David Thompson
Nasa Jet Propulsion Lab

Orbiters, Landers, and Rovers: Computer Vision for Autonomous Space Exploration

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: David Thompson received a PhD from the Robotics Institute, where he participated in the FRC Life in the Atacama and Science Autonomy projects. These days he is a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He works in the Machine Learning and Instrument Autonomy group, and focuses [...]

RI Seminar
Andrew Biewener
Harvard University

Animal models for robotic design: neuromuscular and biomechanical studies of terrestrial and aerial locomotion

Bio: Andrew A. Biewener received his BS degree in Zoology from Duke University, NC, USA in 1974 and his MA and PhD in Biology from Harvard University, MA, USA in 1982. His academic appointments include being an Instructor (1982-84), Assistant Professor (1984-90), and Professor (1990-1998) at the University of Chicago, where he also served as [...]

VASC Seminar
Dov Katz
CMU

Interactive Perception for Autonomous Manipulation

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dov Katz is a postdoctoral fellow with the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include autonomous manipulation, computer vision, and machine learning. He received his MS in 2008 and Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his BS in 2004 from Tel-Aviv University, [...]

RI Seminar
Frédo Durand
MIT

Revealing the invisible

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Frédo Durand is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1999, supervised by Claude Puech and George Drettakis. From 1999 till 2002, [...]

RI Seminar
Ed Colgate
Breed University Professor of Design
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Northwestern University

Force Feedback for Fingertips

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Ed Colgate is the Breed University Professor of Design at Northwestern University. His research interests lie in the areas of haptic interface, telemanipulation, prosthetics and physical human-robot interaction. With his colleague Michael Peshkin, Colgate is the inventor of a class of collaborative robots known as “cobots.” He is the founding Editor-in-Chief [...]

VASC Seminar
Larry Zitnick
Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research

Exploring the semantic understanding of abstract scenes

Bio: C. Lawrence Zitnick received the PhD degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His thesis focused on a maximum entropy approach to efficient inference. Previously, his work centered on stereo vision, including the development of a commercial portable 3D camera. Currently, he is a senior researcher at the Interactive Visual Media group [...]

VASC Seminar
Andrew Gallagher
Cornell University

Putting the Pieces Together: Assembling Puzzles and Shredded Documents

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Andrew Gallagher is a Visiting Research Scientist at Cornell University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, beginning in June 2012. Andrew earned the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, advised by Prof. Tsuhan Chen. Before that, Andrew received an M.S. degree from Rochester Institute [...]

VASC Seminar
Ivan Laptev
INRIA Paris

Human action recognition: recent progress, open questions and future challenges

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Ivan Laptev is a full-time researcher in the WILLOW team at INRIA Paris and Ecole Normale Superieure. He has received his PhD in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in 2004 and his Master of Science degree from the same institute in 1997. He has been a research [...]