PhD Thesis Defense
Nathan D. Ratliff
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning to Search: Structured Prediction Techniques for Imitation Learning

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Modern robots successfully manipulate objects, navigate rugged terrain, drive in urban settings, and play world-class chess. Unfortunately, programming these robots is challenging, time-consuming and expensive; the parameters governing their behavior are often unintuitive, even when the desired behavior is clear and easily demonstrated. Inspired by successful end-to-end learning systems [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Marius Leordeanu
Carnegie Mellon University

Spectral Graph Matching, Learning, and Inference for Computer Vision

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Several important applications in computer vision, such as 2D and 3D object matching, object category and action recognition, object category discovery, and texture discovery and analysis, require the ability to match features efficiently in the presence of background clutter and occlusion. In order to improve matching robustness and accuracy [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Thomas M. Howard
Carnegie Mellon University

Adaptive Model-Predictive Motion Planning for Navigation in Complex Environments

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Outdoor mobile robot motion planning and navigation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence. The search space density and dimensionality, system dynamics and environmental interaction complexity, and the perceptual horizon limitation all contribute to the difficultly of this problem. It is hard to generate a motion plan between arbitrary [...]