PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Current mobile robots generally fall into one of two categories as far as reliability is concerned -- highly unreliable, or very expensive. Most fall into the first category, requiring teams of graduate students or staff engineers to coddle them in the days and hours before a brief demonstration. The [...]

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 3305Abstract: A variety of learning problems in robotics, computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence can be construed as problems of learning statistical models for dynamical systems from sequential observations. Good dynamical system models allow us to represent and predict observations in these systems, which in turn enables applications [...]

Event Location: GHC 7101Abstract: The creation of a diabetes management assistant that can remotely collect data, increase communication between patient and care provider, and automatically analyze all available information could improve the health of many diabetics. Individual models, taking into account nutrition, medication, and exercise, with appropriate mathematical modeling, can learn accurate representations of specific [...]

Event Location: GHC 6115Abstract: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been an active area of research for several decades, and has become a foundation of indoor mobile robotics. However, although the scale and quality of results have improved markedly in that time period, no current technique can effectively handle city-sized urban areas. The Global Positioning [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]