Lytro – Light Field Cameras, Entrepreneurship and the Future of Photography
Event Location: Disney Research Pittsburgh, CIC Building, Lower Level, Tomorrowland Conference RoomBio: Ren Ng is the founder of Lytro, and developed the underlying technology during graduate school. Ren's Ph.D. research on light field technology won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and Stanford University’s Arthur Samuel Award. Ren's leadership of Lytro has also earned him a [...]
Member, Maryland Robotics Center, Institute for Systems Research
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Towards Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery Under Continuous MRI
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dr. Jaydev P. Desai is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a Member of the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). Prior to joining UMCP, he was an Associate Professor at Drexel University. He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian [...]
Orbiters, Landers, and Rovers: Computer Vision for Autonomous Space Exploration
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: David Thompson received a PhD from the Robotics Institute, where he participated in the FRC Life in the Atacama and Science Autonomy projects. These days he is a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He works in the Machine Learning and Instrument Autonomy group, and focuses [...]
Data-Driven Geometric Scene Understanding
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: In this thesis proposal, we describe a data-driven approach to leverage repositories of 3D models for scene understanding. Our ability to relate what we see in an image to a large collection of 3D models allows us to transfer information from these models, creating a rich understanding of the scene. We [...]
Animal models for robotic design: neuromuscular and biomechanical studies of terrestrial and aerial locomotion
Bio: Andrew A. Biewener received his BS degree in Zoology from Duke University, NC, USA in 1974 and his MA and PhD in Biology from Harvard University, MA, USA in 1982. His academic appointments include being an Instructor (1982-84), Assistant Professor (1984-90), and Professor (1990-1998) at the University of Chicago, where he also served as [...]
Robust Natural Language Direction Following through Unknown Environments
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Commanding robots through unconstrained natural language directions is intuitive, flexible, and does not require specialized interfaces or training. Providing this capability would enable effortless coordination in human robot teams that operate in non-specialized environments. However, natural language direction following through unknown environments requires understanding the structure of language, mapping verbs and [...]
Interactive Perception for Autonomous Manipulation
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dov Katz is a postdoctoral fellow with the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include autonomous manipulation, computer vision, and machine learning. He received his MS in 2008 and Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his BS in 2004 from Tel-Aviv University, [...]
Revealing the invisible
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Frédo Durand is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1999, supervised by Claude Puech and George Drettakis. From 1999 till 2002, [...]
Northwestern University
Force Feedback for Fingertips
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Ed Colgate is the Breed University Professor of Design at Northwestern University. His research interests lie in the areas of haptic interface, telemanipulation, prosthetics and physical human-robot interaction. With his colleague Michael Peshkin, Colgate is the inventor of a class of collaborative robots known as “cobots.” He is the founding Editor-in-Chief [...]
Exploring the semantic understanding of abstract scenes
Bio: C. Lawrence Zitnick received the PhD degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His thesis focused on a maximum entropy approach to efficient inference. Previously, his work centered on stereo vision, including the development of a commercial portable 3D camera. Currently, he is a senior researcher at the Interactive Visual Media group [...]