PhD Thesis Proposal

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Understanding how neural circuits in the brain enable complex, flexible behavior is now a tangible endeavor. This has in large part been made possible by the ability to record from neurons in mammals, such as rats and monkeys, as the animals are performing a behavioral task. One can then ask how [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Planning with uncertainty in the model of the environment is a common, and difficult, problem. Typically, any differences in the past observations between two states causes the planner to plan for them as completely different states. This work is based on the fact that not all past observations are relevant to [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. Naively, this requires that each agent take into account every teammates' state, observation, and choice of action when making decisions about its own actions. This results in a huge joint policy space [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: This thesis tackles the problem of automatically discovering and modeling objects from a collection of images from the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) environment. I propose an approach that can discover object instances under severe clutter, occlusion, changes of view point, heterogeneity of object appearance and imperfect segmentation. The proposed approach [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Robots that can operate in human environments in a safe and robust manner would be of tremendous benefit to society in general, due to their immense potential as assistance providers to humans. However, robots to this day have seen limited application outside of the industrial setting in environments such as homes [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Believability of characters is an objective in literature, theater, animation, film, and other media. In human-computer interaction, believability of on-screen agents improves perceptual and behavioral responses to the character. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as homophily---humans tend to associate and bond with similar others. In this thesis proposal, we first [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. They will offer a variety of assistive technologies that will augment our capabilities and enhance our lives. Dynamically stable mobile robots that actively balance can be effective personal mobile robots as they can be tall enough [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis introduces the concept of visual subcategories. Many image understanding tasks such as object detection and image classification are formulated as binary classification problems, where the positive examples are instances (bounding boxes or images) of a specific object or scene category, and negative examples are background patches or images. Due [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Complex visual tasks often require high resolution imagery of specific phenomena but run too slowly to process large fields of view. In this thesis, we explore a general technique for camera control designed to maximize the high resolution imagery captured that is useful to the given task while minimizing excess imagery [...]