Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robot-assisted surgery has been increasingly adopted in a wide variety of surgical applications because it offers fine manipulation with high precision and dexterity. Despite the commercial success of robotic platforms, practical use in microsurgery is still challenging due to a considerable level of accuracy required at sub-millimeter scales. Limited visualization and [...]
Perceptually Valid Dynamics for Smiles and Blinks
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Human observers are 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, we develop a framework to explore representations of two key facial expressions: blinks and [...]
Design and Control of a Flapping Flight Micro Aerial Vehicle
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Miniature flapping flight systems hold great promise in matching the agility of their natural counterparts, bees, flies, and hummingbirds. Characterized by reciprocating wing motion, unsteady aerodynamics, and the ability to hover, insect-like flapping flight presents an interesting locomotion strategy capable of functioning at small size scales and is still a current [...]
Learning the hard way: From children and parents to ultrafast machines
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Neil Johnson heads up a new inter-disciplinary research group in Complexity at the University of Miami looking at collective behavior and emergent properties in a wide range of real-world Complex Systems: from physical, biological and medical domains through to social and financial domains. He is also a Professor of Physics. He [...]
Programmable Automotive Headlights
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Robert Tamburo is currently a project scientist at the Robotics Institute in the Illumination and Imaging laboratory. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006. Afterwards, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and [...]
Pose Machines: Articulated Pose Estimation via Inference Machines
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Varun Ramakrishna is a PhD student in the Robotics Institute, advised by Prof. Yaser Sheikh and Prof. Takeo Kanade. His research interests include structured prediction problems in computer vision with a focus on understanding human posture and motion from monocular images and image sequences. Varun was previously a master's student in [...]
Unfolding an Indoor Origami World
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: David Fouhey is a Ph.D. student at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is supervised by Abhinav Gupta and Martial Hebert. He holds an A.B. in Computer Science from Middlebury College. His research addresses a variety of scene understanding tasks in computer vision, with a particular interest in inferring [...]
From Shape-from-shading through e-Heritage
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dr. Katsushi Ikeuchi is a Professor at the University of Tokyo. He received a Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978. After working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI Lab for two years, Electrotechnical Lab, Japan for five years, and Carnegie Mellon University for ten [...]
From Compliant Mechanisms to Hyper-Elastic Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Michael Yu Wang is a Professor at National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS in 2014, he served on the engineering faculty at University of Maryland and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has numerous professional honors–National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award, 1993; Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from [...]