VASC Seminar
Or Patashnik
PhD student
Tel-Aviv University

Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: In this talk, I will focus on presenting my recent work which will be presented at CVPR in less than two months. Text-guided image generation has progressed rapidly in recent years, inspiring major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. Recently, it has been shown that using score distillation, one can successfully text-guide a NeRF model to [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Simulation-driven vision-based tactile sensor design using Physics Based Rendering

GHC 6501

Abstract:  Touch is an essential sensing modality for making autonomous robots more dexterous and works collaboratively with humans. With the advent of vision-based tactile sensors, roboticists have tried to incorporate tactile sensors in various robot structures for various robotic manipulation tasks to increase robustness, precision, and reliability. However, the design of vision-based tactile sensors is [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Efficient Interactive Learning with Unobserved Confounders

GHC 6501

Abstract: Interactive learning systems like self-driving cars, recommender systems, and large language model chatbots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. From a machine learning perspective, the key technical challenge underlying such systems is that rather than simple prediction on i.i.d. data, an interactive learner influences the distribution of inputs it sees via the choices [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Towards Reconstructing Non-rigidity from Single Camera

GHC 6501

Abstract: In this talk we will discuss how to infer 3D from images captured by a single camera, without assuming the target scenes / objects being static. The non-static setting makes our problem ill-posed and challenging to solve, but is vital in practical applications where target-of-interest is non-static. To solve ill-posed problems, the current trend [...]

Faculty Events

SCS Master’s Diploma Ceremony followed by Reception

Auditorium, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum 4141 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

Ceremony: 11:30 a.m. Auditorium, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum 4141 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Reception: Following ceremony Grand Ballroom, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum 4141 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Faculty Events

SCS PhD Hooding Ceremony followed by Reception

Kresge Theatre, College of Fine Arts

SCS PhD Hooding Ceremony: 11 a.m. Kresge Theatre, College of Fine ArtsReception: Following ceremony Gates Hillman Center, 6th floor

Faculty Events

Commencement Ceremony

Gesling Stadium, CMU’s campus 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

VASC Seminar

Navigating to Objects in the Real World

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the classical pipeline for spatial navigation, which builds a geometric map using depth sensors and plans to reach point goals. Broadly, end-to-end [...]

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Social

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Please join us for our RI Faculty Social. Heavy appetizers and beverages will be served.

MSR Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Sarvesh Patil

GHC 6115

Title: Soft Delta Robots for Dexterous Manipulation Abstract: Dexterous manipulation capabilities of end-effectors afford us a wide range of strategies for fine-grained manipulation tasks. Recent utilization of readily available materials like soft filaments and silicone elastomers has enabled the development of low-cost mechanically intelligent robotic manipulators. This is important for democratizing robot manipulation and increasing [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Large Scale Dense 3D Reconstruction via Sparse Representations

NSH 4305

Abstract: Dense 3D scene reconstruction is in high demand today for view synthesis, navigation, and autonomous driving. A practical reconstruction system inputs multi-view scans of the target using RGB-D cameras, LiDARs, or monocular cameras, computes sensor poses, and outputs scene reconstructions. These algorithms are computationally expensive and memory-intensive due to the presence of 3D data. [...]

MSR Thesis Defense
MSR Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Fan Yang

NSH 3305

Title: Exploring Safe Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Decision Making   Abstract: Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on the problem of training a policy to maximize the reward while ensuring safety. It is an important step towards applying RL to safety-critical real-world applications. However, safe RL is challenging due to the trade-off between the two objectives [...]

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Business Meeting

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.

VASC Seminar
Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad

Going Beyond Continual Learning: Towards Organic Lifelong Learning

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: Supervised learning, the harbinger of machine learning over the last decade, has had tremendous impact across application domains in recent years. However, the notion of a static trained machine learning model is becoming increasingly limiting, as these models are deployed in changing and evolving environments. Among a few related settings, continual learning has gained significant [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Incorporating Robustness into Learning-Based Aircraft Detection and Tracking Systems

NSH 4305

Abstract: In the field of aviation, the Detect and Avoid (DAA) problem deals with incorporating collision avoidance capabilities into current autopilot navigation systems. In order to standardize DAA capabilities, ASTM has published performance requirements to define safe DAA operations of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). However, the performance of DAA models are entirely dependent on the [...]

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Business Meeting

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Business Meeting

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.

MSR Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Siddarth Venkatraman

GHC 4405

Title: Latent Skill Models for Offline Reinforcement Learning Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-value policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching portions of suboptimal trajectories from the static dataset while avoiding extrapolation [...]

VASC Seminar
Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Texas at Austin

Predictive Scene Representations for Embodied Visual Search

GHC 6501

Abstract:  My research advances embodied AI by developing large-scale datasets and state-of-the-art algorithms. In my talk, I will specifically focus on the embodied visual search problem, which aims to enable intelligent search for robots and augmented reality (AR) assistants. Embodied visual search manifests as the visual navigation problem in robotics, where a mobile agent must efficiently navigate [...]

MSR Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Long-Tailed 3D Detection via Multi-Modal Fusion

NSH 3305

Abstract: Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have advanced techniques for training 3D detectors, particularly on large-scale LiDAR data. Surprisingly, although semantic class labels naturally follow a long-tailed distribution, these benchmarks focus on only a few common classes (e.g., pedestrian and car) and neglect many rare classes in-the-tail (e.g., debris and stroller). However, in the real [...]

Faculty Events
Associate Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

TBA

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

MSR Thesis Defense
MSR Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Eric Schneider

GHC 4405

Title: Phenotyping and Skeletonization for Agricultural Robotics Abstract: Scientific phenotyping of plants is a crucial aspect of experimental plant breeding. By accurately measuring plant characteristics, phenotyping plays a vital role in the development of new plant varieties that are better adapted to specific environments and have improved yield, quality, and resistance to stress and disease. In [...]

MSR Thesis Defense
MSR Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Shivesh Khaitan

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/95273358670?pwd=Z09Jc3g1aDV1dTdTMEVUWUwxcUZPQT09 Meeting ID: 952 7335 8670 Passcode: 050721 Title: Exploring Reinforcement Learning approaches for Safety Critical EnvironmentsAbstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for addressing challenging decision-making and robotic control tasks. By leveraging the principles of trial-and-error learning, RL algorithms enable agents to learn optimal strategies through interactions with an environment. However, [...]

MSR Thesis Defense
MSR Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Ravi Tej Akella

NSH 4305

Title: Distributional Distance Classifiers for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Abstract: Autonomous systems are increasingly being deployed in stochastic real-world environments. Often, these agents are trying to find the shortest path to a commanded goal. But what does it mean to find the shortest path in stochastic environments, where every strategy has a non-zero probability of failing? At [...]

MSR Thesis Defense
MSR Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk: Seth Karten

NSH 3305

Title: Emergent Communication and Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Teams Abstract: Explicit communication among humans is key to coordinating and learning. In multi-agent reinforcement learning for partially-observable environments, agents may convey information to others via learned communication, allowing the team to complete its task. However, agents need to be able to communicate more than simply referential messages [...]