Student Talks
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 [...]
Social Robot Navigation
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Mobile robots that encounter people on a regular basis must react to them in some way. While traditional robot control algorithms treat all unexpected sensor readings as objects to be avoided, we argue that robots that operate around people should react socially to those people, following the same social conventions that [...]
Margin-based Spatial and Temporal Alignment for Computer Vision Problems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Spatial and temporal alignment are fundamental problems in computer vision that arise naturally in many real-world applications ranging from object localization and visual tracking to image categorization and activity recognition. Most alignment algorithms can be posed as an optimization problem of an energy function over a set of allowable spatial or [...]
Learning and Optimization Methods for High Level Planning
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Motion planning for complex systems such as legged robots and mobile manipulators has proven to be a difficult task due to the high dimensional configuration spaces that underly such systems, and also due to the variety of constraints which must be met at all times. One way to escape the so-called [...]