Student Talks
Illuminating Water Drops
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Microscopic droplets create fog and mist, and large drops fall as rain. 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 [...]
Rhythmic Human-Robot Social Interaction
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Social scientists have identified and begun to describe rhythmic and synchronous properties of human social interaction. However, social interactions with robots are often stilted due to temporal mismatch between the behaviors, both verbal and nonverbal, of the interacting partners. This thesis brings the theory of interactional synchrony to bear on the [...]
3D Reconstruction and Tracking of Anatomical Structures from Endoscopic Images
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Endoscopy is attracting increasing attention for its role in minimally invasive, computer-assisted and tele-surgery. Analyzing images from endoscopes to obtain meaningful information about anatomical structures such as their 3D shapes, deformations and appearances, is crucial to such surgical applications. However, 3D reconstruction from endoscopic images is challenging due to the small [...]
Principled Search Space Design
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Motion planning and navigation of outdoor mobile robots has received a lot of attention in the last thirty years, yet today it still remains a challenging problem. Among the many reasons, three stand out. First, most physical mobility systems feature differential constraints that render the coupling between the control [...]
Realtime Contextual Trajectory Set Generation for Local Area Motion Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robotic motion planning is known to be an NP Hard problem. Many real-world applications employ hierarchical planning to decompose a complex problem into a set of sub-problems, each addressed by a sub-planner that makes different trade-offs and assumptions. To achieve scalability, long-range planners such as D* simplify the robot’s motion model, [...]
Data-driven Scene Parsing With the Visual Memex
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This proposal is concerned with the problem of image understanding. Given a single static image, the goal is to explain the entire image by recognizing all of the objects depicted in the image. We formulate the problem of image understanding as image parsing -- breaking up the image into semantically meaningful [...]
Aligning Capabilities of Interactive Educational Tools to Learner Goals
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This thesis is about a design process for creating educationally relevant tools. I submit that the key to creating tools that are educationally relevant is to focus on ensuring a high degree of alignment between the designed tool and the broader educational context into which the tool will be integrated. The [...]
Toward Versatile Structural Modification for Bayesian Nonparametric Time Series Models
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Unsupervised learning techniques discover organizational structure in data, but to do so they must approach the problem with a priori assumptions. A fundamental trend in the development of these techniques has been the relaxation or elimination of the unwanted or arbitrary structural assumptions they impose. For systems that derive hidden Markov [...]
Closed-Form Analysis of Human Motion in Monocular Videos
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: When interacting with our surroundings, our actions are highly structured. This structure is a consequence of the purposefulness of human behavior --- we tend to do similar things in similar circumstances. Artificial systems must develop an understanding of the underlying dynamics that encode this structure to understand human actions in a [...]
Shedding Light on Modeling: Active Illumination for Mapping of Subterranean Voids
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Subterranean environments are among the most hazardous, remote and unexplored in the solar system. Subsurface applications represent the prime unexploited opportunity for robotic modeling, yet robot mappers are seldom utilized. Human survey is often preferred for reasons of economy, resulting in unnecessary risk and substandard quality. There is urgent need to [...]