VASC Seminar
Alper Ayvaci
Postdoctoral Fellow
UCLA

Occlusion Detection and Its Role in Object Discovery in Video

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Alper Ayvaci received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles in August, 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefano Soatto. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the same institute. His general research interests are in computer vision and applications of geometry and machine learning in [...]

RI Seminar
Matt Mason
Director, Robotics Institute, RI/CS
Carnegie Mellon University

State of the Institute

Event Location: NHS 1305Bio: Matt Mason is best known for his accomplishments in manipulation, including constructing a ship in a bottle, juggling three clubs or four balls, and the ability to snap his fingers with either hand. His work in other areas includes construction of a manned surface vehicle which autonomously reconfigured to an unmanned [...]

VASC Seminar
Lexing Xie
Senior Lecturer / Fellow of Computer Science
Australian National University.

Understanding Events and Tags in Media-rich Messages

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Lexing Xie is Senior Lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. She was with IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York from 2005 to 2010, and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University 2007-2009. She received B.S. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and M.S. and [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
William "Red" Whittaker
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Landing the Lunar X Prize: Rovers and Rockets from CMU to the Moon

Event Location: GHC 4307Bio: William “Red” Whittaker is the Fredkin University Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. He has developed dozens of robots, breaking new ground in autonomous vehicles, field robotics, space exploration, mining and agriculture. Whittaker developed the robots that cleaned up the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident. His ground vehicles have driven [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Laura Trutoiu
Carnegie Mellon University

Perceptually Valid Dynamics for Smiles and Blinks

Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Human observers are particularly adept at detecting anomalies in realistic computer-generated (CG) facial animations. With an increased demand for CG characters in education and entertainment applications, it is important to animate accurate, realistic facial expressions. In this thesis proposal, we develop a framework to explore representations of two key facial expressions: [...]

RI Seminar
Mel Torrie
President/Chief Executive Officer
Autonomous Solutions, Inc.

Lessons Learned Bootstrapping a Robotic Vehicle Company

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Mel is a founder and the CEO of Autonomous Solutions, Inc. Prior to founding ASI in 2000, he held a position managing robotics development programs for John Deere, the US Departments of Defense and Energy, and NASA Space Shuttle Payloads at Utah State University. ASI has worked over the last 12 [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Maxim Makatchev
Carnegie Mellon University

Cross-cultural believability of robot characters

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Believability of characters is an objective in literature, theater, animation, film, and other media. Virtual characters, believable as sharing their ethnic background with users, improve their perception of the character and, sometimes, even their task performance. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as homophily---humans tend to associate and bond with similar [...]

RI Seminar
Candace L. Sidner
Research Professor, Computer Science
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Creating a Real-Time Conversation Manager with multiple time scales

Event Location: GHC 6115Bio: My research concerns human communication and collaboration, and their application to agents, and interfaces, especially those using gesture, social behavior, speech, and natural language. Most recently my work has focused on collaboration and dialogue with humanoid robots about simple hosting tasks, and with on-screen agents for health behavior change. Abstract: My [...]

RI Seminar
Catherine Mohr, MD
Director Medical Research
Intuitive Surgical, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA

How should we build robots for the future of surgery?

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dr. Catherine Mohr is the Director of Medical Research at Intuitive Surgical, a high technology surgical robotics company that makes the da Vinci surgical robot. In this role she develops new robotic surgical procedures, and evaluates technologies to improve outcomes with surgical robots. In addition, she is a Consulting Assistant Professor [...]