PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Modeling Coupled Human-Robot Motion for Provable Safety

Abstract: Guide robots that help users who are blind or low vision navigate through crowds and complex environments show promise for improving accessibility in public spaces. These robots must provide real-time safety guarantees for the users, which requires accurate modeling of their behavior in the context of closely coupled human-robot motion. This model must also [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Mosam Dabhi

Title: Multi-view NRSfM: Affordable setup for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction   Abstract: Triangulating a point in 3D space should only require two corresponding camera projections. However in practice, expensive multi-view setups -- involving tens sometimes hundreds of cameras -- are required to obtain the high fidelity 3D reconstructions necessary for many modern applications. In this talk, we argue [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Robust Object Representations for Robot Manipulation

Abstract: As robots become more common in our daily lives, they will need to interact with many different environments and countless types of objects. While we, as humans, can easily understand an object after seeing it only once, this task is not trivial for robots. Researchers have, for the most part, been left with two [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Diminished Reality for Close Quarters Robotic Telemanipulation

Abstract: In robot telemanipulation tasks, the robot itself can sometimes occlude a target object from the user's view. We investigate the potential of diminished reality to address this problem. Our method uses an optical see-through head-mounted display to create a diminished reality illusion that the robot is transparent, allowing users to see occluded areas behind [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Visual Representation and Recognition without Human Supervision

Abstract: Visual recognition models have seen great advancements by relying on large-scale, carefully curated datasets with human annotations. Most computer vision models leverage human supervision to either construct strong initial representations (e.g. using the ImageNet dataset) or for modeling the visual concepts relevant for downstream tasks (e.g. MS-COCO for object detection). In this thesis, we [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads

Meeting ID: 942 4671 0665 Passcode: jkhzoom Abstract: Photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans is an important capability for telepresence systems. Recently, neural rendering methods have been developed to create high-fidelity models of humans and objects. Some of these methods do not produce results with high-enough fidelity for driveable human models (Neural Volumes) whereas others have [...]

VASC Seminar
Phillip Isola
Assistant Professor
EECS, MIT

When and Why Does Contrastive Learning Work?

Abstract: Contrastive learning organizes data by pulling together related items and pushing apart everything else. These methods have become very popular but it's still not entirely clear when and why they work. I will share two ideas from our recent work. First, I will argue that contrastive learning is really about learning to forget. Different [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Heuristic Search Based Planning by Minimizing Anticipated Search Efforts

Abstract: Robot planning problems in dynamic environments, such as navigation among pedestrians, driving at high-speed on densely populated roads, and manipulation for collaborative tasks alongside humans, necessitate efficient planning. Bounded-suboptimal heuristic search algorithms are a popular alternative to optimal heuristic search algorithms that compromise solution quality for computation speed. Specifically, these searches aim to find [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Liquid Metal Actuators

Abstract: Bioinspired robotic actuators arise from the advances in soft materials and activation methods to achieve desired performance. Because of their intrinsic compliance, actuators built from soft materials and liquids can achieve elastic resilience and adaptability similar to their biological counterparts. Liquid metals provide great opportunities for creating an artificial muscle that generates forces at [...]