RI Seminar
Soon-Jo Chung
Bren Professor of Aerospace and Control and Dynamical Systems
Department of Aerospace , Caltech

Safe and Stable Learning for Agile Robots without Reinforcement Learning

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: My research group (https://aerospacerobotics.caltech.edu/) is working to systematically leverage AI and Machine Learning techniques towards achieving safe and stable autonomy of safety-critical robotic systems, such as robot swarms and autonomous flying cars. Another example is LEONARDO, the world's first bipedal robot that can walk, fly, slackline, and skateboard. Stability and safety are often research problems [...]

VASC Seminar
Jean-François Lalonde
Professor
Université Lava

Towards editable indoor lighting estimation

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  Combining virtual and real visual elements into a single, realistic image requires the accurate estimation of the lighting conditions of the real scene. In recent years, several approaches of increasing complexity---ranging from simple encoder-decoder architecture to more sophisticated volumetric neural rendering---have been proposed. While the quality of automatic estimates has increased, they have the unfortunate downside [...]

VASC Seminar
Project Scientist
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Computational imaging with multiply scattered photons

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  Computational imaging has advanced to a point where the next significant milestone is to image in the presence of multiply-scattered light. Though traditionally treated as noise, multiply-scattered light carries information that can enable previously impossible imaging capabilities, such as imaging around corners and deep inside tissue. The combinatorial complexity of multiply-scattered light transport makes [...]

RI Seminar
Ankur Mehta
Assistant Professor & Samueli Fellow
Electrical & Computer Engineering, UCLA

Towards $1 robots

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Robots are pretty great -- they can make some hard tasks easy, some dangerous tasks safe, or some unthinkable tasks possible.  And they're just plain fun to boot.  But how many robots have you interacted with recently?  And where do you think that puts you compared to the rest of the world's people? In [...]

VASC Seminar
Wei-Chiu Ma
PhD Candidate
MIT

Mental models for 3D modeling and generation

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  Humans have extraordinary capabilities of comprehending and reasoning about our 3D visual world. One particular reason is that when looking at an object or a scene, not only can we see the visible surface, but we can also hallucinate the invisible parts - the amodal structure, appearance, affordance, etc. We have accumulated thousands of [...]

RI Seminar
Nidhi Kalra
Senior Information Scientist
RAND Corporation

What (else) can you do with a robotics degree?

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: In 2004, half-way through my robotics Ph.D., I had a panic-inducing thought: What if I don’t want to build robots for the rest of my life? What can I do with this degree?! Nearly twenty years later, I have some answers: tackle climate change in Latin America, educate Congress about autonomous vehicles, improve how [...]

VASC Seminar
Michael Zollhoefer
Research Scientist
Reality Labs Research

Complete Codec Telepresence

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  Imagine two people, each of them within their own home, being able to communicate and interact virtually with each other as if they are both present in the same shared physical space. Enabling such an experience, i.e., building a telepresence system that is indistinguishable from reality, is one of the goals of Reality Labs [...]

VASC Seminar
Kayvon Fatahalian
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Stanford University

R.I.P ohyay: experiences building online virtual experiences during the pandemic: what works, what hasn’t, and what we need in the future

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  During the pandemic I helped design ohyay (https://ohyay.co), a creative tool for making and hosting highly customized video-based virtual events. Since Fall 2020 I have personally designed many online events: ranging from classroom activities (lectures, small group work, poster sessions, technical papers PC meetings), to conferences, to virtual offices, to holiday parties involving 100's [...]

VASC Seminar
Fabio Pizzati
PhD student
Inria

Physics-informed image translation

Abstract:  Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable performances in image translation, being able to map source input images to target domains (e.g. from male to female, day to night, etc.). However, their performances may be limited by insufficient supervision, which may be challenging to obtain. In this talk, I will present our recent works [...]

RI Seminar
Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor
Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Robots Should Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Despite numerous successes in deep robotic learning over the past decade, the generalization and versatility of robots across environments and tasks has remained a major challenge. This is because much of reinforcement and imitation learning research trains agents from scratch in a single or a few environments, training special-purpose policies from special-purpose datasets. In [...]