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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Visual Mapping of Rivers, Vineyards and Orchards
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Stephen Nuske is a project scientist in the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He originally joined CMU as a PostDoc in 2008 after completing his PhD at the University of Queensland and the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia.Abstract: Maps can store and convey many valuable attributes, [...]
Velocity-Space Approaches for Multi-agent Motion Planning and Crowd Simulations
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Dinesh Manocha is currently the Phi Delta Theta/Mason Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has co-authored than 330 papers in the leading conferences and journals on computer graphics, robotics, and scientific computing. He has also served program chair for many conferences and [...]
Gaussian Smoothing for Nonconvex Optimization with Applications to Computer Vision
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Hossein Mobahi is a postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in Dec 2012. He has worked on several topics in computer vision and machine learning, including image alignment, image segmentation, 3D [...]