Student Talks
Understanding and Recreating Visual Appearance Under Natural Illumination
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: The appearance of an outdoor scene is determined to a great extent by the prevailing illumination conditions. However, most practical computer vision applications treat illumination more as a nuisance rather than a source of signal. In this dissertation, we suggest that we should instead embrace illumination, even in the challenging, uncontrolled [...]
Exploring bounded optimal coordination for heterogeneous teams with cross-schedule dependencies
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Many domains, such as emergency assistance, agriculture, construction, and planetary exploration, will increasingly require effective coordination of teams of robots and humans to accomplish a collection of spatially distributed heterogeneous tasks. Such coordination problems range from those that require loosely coordinated teams in which agents independently perform their assigned tasks, to [...]
Cross-cultural believability of robot characters
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Believability of characters is an objective in literature, theater, animation, film, and other media. In human-computer interaction, believability of on-screen agents improves perceptual and behavioral responses to the character. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as homophily---humans tend to associate and bond with similar others. In this thesis proposal, we first [...]
Fast, Dynamic and Graceful Navigation for Balancing Mobile Robots
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. They will offer a variety of assistive technologies that will augment our capabilities and enhance our lives. Dynamically stable mobile robots that actively balance can be effective personal mobile robots as they can be tall enough [...]
Visual Subcategories
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis introduces the concept of visual subcategories. Many image understanding tasks such as object detection and image classification are formulated as binary classification problems, where the positive examples are instances (bounding boxes or images) of a specific object or scene category, and negative examples are background patches or images. Due [...]
Thought Recognition: Predicting and Decoding Brain Activity Using the Zero-Shot Learning Model
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Machine learning algorithms have been successfully applied to learning classifiers in many domains such as computer vision, fraud detection, and brain image analysis. Typically, classifiers are trained to predict a class value given a set of labeled training data that includes all possible class values, and sometimes additional unlabeled training data. [...]
Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand [...]
Constrained Manipulation Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: For robots to be useful in our homes they must be able to interact with our everyday environments and obey constraints on their motion. This thesis focuses on manipulation planning algorithms, which use search and optimization to quickly compute trajectories that allow a robot to interact with its environment. Planning for [...]
Light and Water Drops
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Because of their shape and refractive properties, water drops exhibit a wide variety of visual effects. If not directly illuminated by a light source, then they are difficult to see. But if they are directly illuminated, they can become the brightest objects in [...]
Push Recovery Control for Force-Controlled Humanoid Robots
Event Location: GHC 6115Abstract: Humanoid robots represent the state of the art in complex robot systems, but the design of controllers can be challenging and tedious. High performance controllers that can handle unknown perturbations will be required if complex robots are to one day interact safely with people in everyday environments. The high degree of [...]