PhD Thesis Proposal

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Humans and robots would benefit from having rich semantic maps of the terrain in which they operate. Mobile robots equipped with sensors and perception software could build such maps as they navigate through a new environment. This information could then be used by humans or robots for better localization and path [...]

Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Human observers are particularly adept at detecting anomalies in realistic computer-generated (CG) facial animations. With an increased demand for CG characters in education and entertainment applications, it is important to animate accurate, realistic facial expressions. In this thesis proposal, we develop a framework to explore representations of two key facial expressions: [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: There is considerable interest in having robots continue to perform autonomously over time in human environments despite changes in their environment. Most state-of-the-art robot localization and mapping approaches assume that the world can be represented as a static map. However, real human environments are not static - some areas like corridors [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to enable robots to produce motion that is suitable for human-robot collaboration and co-existence. Most motion in robotics is purely functional: industrial robots move to package parts, vacuuming robots move to suck dust, and personal robots move to clean up a dirty table. This type [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Snake robots are ideally suited to highly confined environments because their small cross-sections and highly redundant kinematics allow them to enter and move through tight spaces with a high degree of dexterity. Despite these theoretical advantages, snake robots also pose a number of practical challenges that have limited their usefulness in [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Many computer vision problems, such as object classification, motion estimation or shape registration rely on solving the correspondence problem. Existing algorithms to solve the correspondence problems are usually NP-hard, difficult to approximate and lack mechanism for feature selection. This proposal addresses the correspondence problem in computer vision, and proposes two new [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: A new trainable model and method for generating prosody for speech synthesis is proposed, in which a relationship between pragmatics, intonational phonology, and performance is made explicit in a language-neutral manner. The literature of pragmatics and intonation is broad, but produces only coarse descriptions and few actionable models (Steedman; Pierrehumbert and [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis provides a system that allows users to interact with objects and human subjects in photographs in three dimensions. Current photo-editing tools provide a diverse array of operations in photographs. However, they are limited to the 2D plane of the image. The key contribution of this thesis is to leverage [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: This research addresses the problem of planning views for modeling large, local, substantially 3D terrain features, such as skylights, at long range from surface rovers. Skylights, which are vertical cave entrances, and other pits have been identified in recent high-resolution images of the Moon and Mars. Planetary pits are interesting scientific [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In the United States the annual cost of cardiovascular disease exceeds $475 billion. Medical imaging costs more than $100 billion annually, with cardiovascular imaging representing almost one-third. Any approach that can reduce the need for imaging in cardiovascular care has the potential to provide significant savings. Without direct visualization of the [...]