PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Towards Understanding and Mitigating Biases

NSH 3305

Abstract: There are many problems in real life that involve collecting and aggregating evaluation from people, such as conference peer review and peer grading. In this thesis, we consider multiple sources of biases that may arise in this process: (1) human bias -- the data collected from people are noisy and reflect people's calibration criteria [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Extern
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Toward Intent Recognition through Nonverbal Behaviors in Assistive Co-Manipulation

NSH 1109

Abstract: Robots are becoming more versatile, increasing the available opportunities to use them in situations that aid people in everyday tasks. For example, recent research has investigated robot manipulators for assisting people with motor impairments in activities of daily living such as eating a meal. To form successful collaborations in these interactions, researchers need to [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Anqi Yang – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: 3D Object Detection from CT Scans using a Slice-and-fuse Approach   Abstract: Automatic object detection in 3D X-ray Computed Tomography imagery has recently gained research attention due to its promising applications in aviation baggage screening. The huge dimension of an individual 3D scan, however, poses formidable computational challenges when coupled with deep 3D convolutional [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Tian Ye – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Interpretable Intuitive Physics Model   Abstract: Humans have a remarkable ability to use physical commonsense and predict the effect of collisions. But do they understand the underlying factors? Can they predict if the underlying factors have changed? Interestingly, in most cases humans can predict the effects of similar collisions with different conditions such as changes [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Rotational Distributions for Pose Estimation

NSH 4305

Abstract: For robots to operate robustly in the real world, they should be aware of their uncertainty, particularly when estimating the position and orientation, or pose, of objects. This uncertainty can be caused by many factors, such as occlusions, poor lighting, or object symmetry. These factors can naturally induce an inherent ambiguity in terms of [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Hunter Goforth – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Learning for Registration in 2D and 3D   Abstract: We explore the application of deep learning to 2D (image) and 3D (point cloud) registration, especially in scenarios where traditional methods can fail.   In the 2D case, we apply a recently-proposed learning method to the problem of aligning outdoor imagery taken across different seasons or [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Manipulation Planning using Pushing or Pulling Primitives

NSH 3305

Abstract: Humans manipulate objects using a wide range of actions, such as grasping, pushing, pulling, in-hand rolling, and more. This observation has lead to much research about modeling and learning individual manipulation actions. To better understand the impact of action models on planning and executing manipulation actions, we applied manipulation planning with pushing and pulling [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Cedric Scheerlinck
PhD Student
Australian National University

Event Cameras: Image Reconstruction, Convolutions and Color

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Abstract: Event cameras are novel, bio-inspired visual sensors, whose pixels output asynchronous and independent timestamped spikes at local intensity changes, called ‘events’. Event cameras offer advantages over conventional frame-based cameras in terms of latency, high dynamic range (HDR) and temporal resolution. Event cameras do not output conventional image frames, thus, image reconstruction from events enables [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Yeeho Song – MSR Thesis Talk

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Title: Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Ground Navigation Using Aerial and Satellite Observation Data   Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning(IRL) is a supervised learning paradigm where a learner observes expert demonstrations to learn the hidden cost function to mimic the expert's behavior. Eliminating the need for elaborate feature engineering, deep IRL approaches have been gaining interests [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Sierra Young
Assistant Professor
North Carolina State University

From Farm to Takeoff: Ground and Aerial Robots for Biological Systems Analysis

1305 Newell Simon Hall

Abstract: Biological and agricultural environments are dynamic, unstructured, and uncertain, posing challenges for environmental data collection at the necessary spatial and temporal scales to enable meaningful systems analysis. Small unmanned systems, however, can overcome some of these challenges by enabling autonomous or human-assisted image-based and in situ environmental data collection. This talk will present a suite of [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Satyaki Chakraborty – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 3305

Title: Detecting objects in videos under occlusion   Abstract: While object detection in videos has received a lot of attention in the past few years, most existing methods in this domain do not target detecting objects when they are occluded. However, being able to detect or track an object of interest through occlusion has been [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Junjiao Tian

NSH 4305

Title: Detailed Image Captioning with Hierarchical Attention   Abstract:  Automatic image description is the task of generating a natural sentence which reflects the visual content of an image. A lot of deep learning architectures have been explored in the past few years. While researchers have made great improvement on generating syntactically correct sentences by learning from [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Analysis of Spatio-Temporally Varying Features in Optical Coherence Tomographic (OCT) and Ultrasound (US) Image Sequences

GHC 8102

Abstract: Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Ultrasound (US) are non-ionizing and non-invasive imaging modalities that are clinically used to visualize anatomical structures in the body. OCT has been widely adopted in clinical ophthalmology due to its micron-scale resolution to visualize in-vivo structures of the eye. Ultra-High Frequency Ultrasound (UHFUS) captures images of tissue at a [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Karen Orton

GHC 4405

Title:  Inching for Planetary Rovers   Abstract: . Inching, also called push-rolling, is method of moving for vehicles that can change the position of their wheels relative to their body.  Like an inchworm, it is possible to hold some wheels stationary while advancing the others and the body.  In this research a test apparatus capable [...]

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Social

Tazza D'Oro, 3rd floor, Gates and Hillman Centers

All Robotics Institute faculty are invited to attend this informal team-building business/social event. Beverages and snacks will be provided.

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Extern
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Sha (Yisha) Yi – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Improving Scalability in Multi-Robot Systems with Abstraction and Specialization   Abstract: Planning and controlling multi-robot systems is challenging due to high dimensionality. When the number of robots increases in the system, the complexity of computation grows exponentially. In this thesis, we examine the scalability problem in planning and control of the multi-robot system. We propose [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Andy (Chieh-En) Tsai

NSH 3305

Title: A Generative Approach for Socially Compliant Navigation   Abstract: Robots navigating in human crowds need to optimize their paths not only for the efficiency of their tasks performance but also for the compliance to social norms. One of the key challenges in this context is due to the lack of suitable metrics for evaluating and [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Shubham Agrawal – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: 3D Face Geometry Capture Using Monocular Video   Abstract: Accurate reconstruction of facial geometry has been one of the oldest tasks in computer vision. Despite being a long-studied problem, many modern methods fail to reconstruct realistic looking faces or rely on highly constrained environments for capture. High fidelity face reconstructions have so far been [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Tejas Khot – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Unsupervised Learning for 3D Reconstruction and Blocks World Representation Abstract: Recovering the dense 3D structure of a scene from its images has been a long-standing goal in computer vision. Recent years have seen attempts of encoding richer priors into the geometry-based pipelines with the introduction of learning based methods. We argue that the form of 3D [...]

VASC Seminar
Aljosa Osep
M.Sc. Computer Science
RWTH Aachen University, Computer Vision Group

Tracking Beyond Detection

GHC 6501

Abstract:  The majority of existing vision-based methods perform multi-object tracking in the image domain. Yet, in mobile robotics and autonomous driving scenarios, pixel-precise object localization and trajectory estimation in 3D space are of fundamental importance. Furthermore, the leading paradigms for vision-based multi-object tracking and trajectory prediction heavily rely on object detectors and effectively limit tracking [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Yubo Zhang – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: A structured model for action detection   Abstract:  A dominant paradigm for learning-based approaches in computer vision is training generic models, such as ResNet for image recognition, or I3D for video understanding, on large datasets and allowing them to discover the optimal representation for the problem at hand. While this is an obviously attractive approach, [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Nilesh Kulkarni – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Canonical Surface Mapping via Geometric Cycle Consistency   Abstract: We explore the task of Canonical Surface Mapping (CSM).  Specifically, given an image, we learn to map pixels on the object to their corresponding locations on an abstract 3D model of the category. But how do we learn such a mapping? A supervised approach would [...]