PhD Thesis Defense
Prasanna Velagapudi
Carnegie Mellon University

Distributed Planning Under Uncertainty for Large Teams

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. This requires that each agent take into account teammates' states, observations, and actions when making decisions about its own actions. Naively, finding a good policy involves searching this large joint space, but [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Brian C. Becker
Carnegie Mellon University

Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many existing and promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-millimeter scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain higher positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument removes tremor and [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Santosh K. Divvala
Carnegie Mellon University

Context and Subcategories for Sliding Window Object Recognition

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Object recognition is one of the fundamental challenges in computer vision, where the goal is to identify and localize the extent of object instances within an image. The current de facto standard for building high-performance object category detectors is the sliding window approach. This approach involves scanning an image with a [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Alvaro Collet Romea
Carnegie Mellon University

Lifelong Robotic Object Recognition

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: In this thesis, we study the topic of Lifelong Robotic Object Perception. We propose, as a long-term goal, a framework to recognize known objects and to discover unknown objects in the environment as the robot operates, for as long as the robot operates. We build the foundations for Lifelong Robotic Object [...]

VASC Seminar
Xiaofeng Ren
Intel Labs / University of Washington

Learning Local Image Descriptors for Recognition, Scene Labeling and Grouping

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Xiaofeng Ren is a research scientist at Intel Labs and an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington. His research interests are broadly in the areas of computer vision and its applications, including image features, grouping and segmentation, object recognition, and video analysis. His current focus is on understanding and [...]

RI Seminar
Steven Chase
Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Department of Biomedical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University

Cognitive factors in neural prosthetic control

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Steven Chase is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his BS in Applied Physics from Caltech in ‘97, his MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in ‘99, and his PhD [...]

VASC Seminar
Alireza Fathi
Georgia Tech

An Egocentric Paradigm for Understanding Daily Activities

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Alireza Fathi is a PhD candidate at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, graduating in Spring 2013. He has received his bachelors degree from Sharif University of Technology in Iran in 2006, and his MSc degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada in 2008. His main research areas are computer [...]

VASC Seminar
Silvio Savarese
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Understanding the 3D World from Images

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Silvio Savarese is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After earning his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2005, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2005 - 2008 as a Beckman Institute Fellow. He [...]

RI Seminar
David Pynadath
USC

Modeling Social Reasoning through Recursive, Decision-Theoretic Planning

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: David Pynadath is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research has focused on developing an artificial intelligence framework that can model, simulate, and analyze social interaction, with special emphasis on the methods by which agents, both human and software, form and [...]

VASC Seminar
Hernan Badino
NREC

Visual Topometric Localization

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Hernan Badino received his PhD degree from the J. W. Goethe Frankfurt University, in 2008. Dr. Badino has worked on vision based environment perception for driver assistance systems during his PhD at Daimler AG, in Stuttgart, Germany. He joined the Robotics Institute in 2009 as a post doctoral researcher where he [...]