PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robotic motion planning aspires to match the ease and efficiency with which humans move through and interact with their environment. Yet state of the art robotic planners fall short of human abilities; they are slower in computation, and the results are often of lower quality. One stumbling block in traditional motion [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Autonomous robots are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry, space exploration, and even domestic applications. These diverse fields share the need for robots to perform increasingly complex motion behaviors for interacting with the world. As the robots' tasks become more varied and sophisticated, though, the challenge of programming them becomes more difficult [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Many problems considered in optimization and artificial intelligence research are static: information about the problem is known a priori, and little to no uncertainty about this information is presumed to exist. Most real problems, however, are dynamic: information about the problem is released over time, uncertain events may occur, or the [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Tasks such as street mapping and security surveillance seek a route that traverses a given space to perform a function. These task functions may involve mapping the space for accurate modeling, sensing the space for unusual activity, or searching the space for objects. When these tasks are performed autonomously by robots, [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis describes a brain-computer interface (BCI) system that was developed to allow direct cortical control of 7 active degrees of freedom in a robotic arm. Two monkeys with chronic microelectrode implants in their motor cortices were able to use the arm to complete an oriented grasping task under brain control. [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: For decades, humans have dreamed of making cars that could drive themselves, so that travel would be less taxing, and the roads safer for everyone. Toward this goal, we have made strides in motion planning algorithms for autonomous cars, using a powerful new computing tool, the parallel graphics processing unit (GPU). [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Probabilistic reasoning and learning with permutation data arises as a fundamental problem in myriad applications such as modeling preference rankings over objects (such as webpages), tracking multiple moving objects, reconstructing the temporal ordering of events from multiple imperfect accounts, and more. Since the number of permutations scales factorially with the number [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Recognizing and reasoning about the objects found in an image is one of the key problems in computer vision. This thesis is based on the idea that in order to understand a novel object, it is often not enough to recognize the object category it belongs to (i.e., answering “What is [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Sequences of neural activity representing paths in an environment are expressed in the rodent hippocampus at three distinct time scales, with different hypothesized roles in hippocampal function. As an animal moves through an environment and passes through a series of place fields, place cells activate and deactivate in sequence, at the [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Enabling computers to understand human and animal behavior has the potential to revolutionize many areas that benefit society such as clinical diagnosis, human-computer interaction, and social robotics. Critical to the understanding of human and animal behavior, and any temporally-varying phenomenon in general, is the capability to segment, classify, and cluster time [...]