VASC Seminar
Sarah Aboutalib
Former Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Pittsburgh

Deep Learning to Distinguish Recalled but Benign Mammography Images in Breast Cancer Screening

Abstract: Breast cancer screening using the standard mammography exam currently exhibits a high false recall rate (11.6% for women in the U.S.). Only a low proportion (0.5%) of women who were recalled for additional workup were actually found to have breast cancer. As a result of the unnecessary stress and follow-up work from these false [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Residual Force Control for Agile Human Behavior Imitation and Extended Motion Synthesis

Abstract: Reinforcement learning has shown great promise for synthesizing realistic human behaviors by learning humanoid control policies from motion capture data. However, it is still very challenging to reproduce sophisticated human skills like ballet dance, or to stably imitate long-term human behaviors with complex transitions. The main difficulty lies in the dynamics mismatch between the [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Extern
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Studying the Evolution of Pedestrian Group Space

Abstract: Imagine walking along a busy sidewalk, do you track the movement of every single individual? Or do you simply group pedestrians with similar moving patterns and then track the movement of this group? Grouping is a common behavior in pedestrian navigation and it is typically inappropriate for a robot to cut through the social [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Unsupervised Learning of the 4D Audio-Visual World from Sparse Unconstrained Real-World Samples

Abstract: We, humans, can easily observe, explore, and analyze the world we live in. We, however, struggle to share our observation, exploration, and analysis with others. This thesis introduce Computational Studio, computational machinery that can understand, explore, and create the four-dimensional audio-visual world. This allows: (1) humans to communicate with other humans without any loss [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Xueting Li – MSR Thesis Talk

Zoom

Title: Multi-agent Deception in Attack-Defense Stochastic Game   Abstract: In adversarial scenarios, defending oneself by using deception has recently been studied. A popular direction is to design deceptive defense strategies when the defender has complete information of the game and the attacker doesn't. The work on deception so far models the games as a signal game [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Physical Interaction and Manipulation of the Environment using Aerial Robots

Abstract: There has been an increasing demand for applications that include aerial robots' physical interactions with their environment, such as contact inspection, package pickup, and drilling. The demand has pushed the research groups towards new robot architectures and methods, but only limited research has been done to enable real-world applications. Fully-actuated multirotors were developed to [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Visual Recognition Towards Autonomy

Abstract: Perception for autonomy presents a collection of compelling challenges for visual recognition. We focus on three key challenges in this thesis. The first key challenge is learning representations for 2D data such as RGB images. 2D sensing brings unique challenges in scale variance and occlusion. Intuitively, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall object [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Rich Models and Maps in Factor Graphs with Applications to Tactile Sensing

Abstract: Factor graphs offer a flexible and powerful framework for solving large-scale, nonlinear inference problems as encountered in robot perception. Typically these methods rely on simple models that are efficient to optimize. However, robots often perceive the world through complex, high-dimensional observations. They must in turn infer states that are used downstream by planning and [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Shubhankar Deshpande – MSR Thesis Talk

Zoom

Where: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/92520469322?pwd=SjlpTVI5MGdtN1VBakFkRG82bStYQT09 Meeting ID: 925 2046 9322 Passcode: 323696   Calendar Invite: https://tinyurl.com/shuby-msr-thesis-talk-invite Title: Towards Interpretable RL — Interactive Visualizations to Increase Insight Abstract: Visualization tools for supervised learning (SL) allow users to interpret, introspect, and gain an intuition for the successes and failures of their models. While reinforcement learning (RL) practitioners ask many of [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Distributed Navigation of Quadrotor Teams in Uncertain 3D Workspaces

Abstract: A fundamental requirement for realizing scalable and responsive real-world multi-robot systems for time-sensitive critical applications such as search and rescue or building clearance is a motion-planning and coordination framework that exhibits two essential properties. The first property is safety which encompasses aspects relating to kinodynamic feasibility and collision-avoidance. The second property is reliability which [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Soft actuators by electrochemical oxidation of liquid metal surfaces

Abstract: Soft robotic systems typically operate through the use of soft actuators constructed from highly deformable materials or liquids. Because of their intrinsic compliance, these actuators can achieve elastic resilience and adaptability similar to their biological counterparts. One challenge with engineering these artificial muscles is the selection of soft materials and activation methods while maintaining [...]

VASC Seminar
Noah Snavely
Associate Professor
Cornell University and Google Research

The Plenoptic Camera

Abstract: Imagine a futuristic version of Google Street View that could dial up any possible place in the world, at any possible time. Effectively, such a service would be a recording of the plenoptic function—the hypothetical function described by Adelson and Bergen that captures all light rays passing through space at all times. While the plenoptic function [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Rohith Pillai – MSR Thesis Talk

Zoom

ZOOM Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/95344974779?pwd=aXlmbktDMFZIUjhyeTRuNWxmeXcwdz09 Meeting ID: 953 4497 4779 Passcode: 783497   Title:  3D Face Reconstruction from Monocular Video and its Applications In the Wild   Abstract: 3D face reconstruction is a very popular field of computer vision due to its applications in social media, entertainment and health. However, ever since the introduction of 3D morphable models as [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

A Graph-Based Method for Joint Instance Segmentation of Point Clouds and Image Sequences

Abstract: While learning-based semantic instance segmentation methods have achieved impressive progress, their use is limited in robotics applications due to reliance on expensive training data annotations and assumptions of single sensor modality or known object classes. We propose a novel graph-based instance segmentation approach that combines information from a 2D image sequence and a 3D [...]