PhD Thesis Proposal
Umashankar Nagarajan
Carnegie Mellon University

Fast, Dynamic and Graceful Navigation for Balancing Mobile Robots

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. They will offer a variety of assistive technologies that will augment our capabilities and enhance our lives. Dynamically stable mobile robots that actively balance can be effective personal mobile robots as they can be tall enough [...]

Special Events

2011 National Robotics Week Celebration

Event Location: Carnegie Mellon Main CampusAbstract: The Robotics Institute will celebrate National Robotics Week starting with the Teruko Yata Memorial Lecture and reception on Thursday and will continue on Friday with the project demonstrations, MOBOT Races, and a reception for current and former Robotics Institute Alumni. Schedule of Events (Please check back for updates) Pre-registration [...]

Seminar
William Swartout
Director of Technology Institute for Creative Technologies and Research Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Southern California

What Have We Learned From Virtual Humans?

Event Location: Rashid Auditorium - Gates and Hillman Centers 4401. Open to the public.Bio: William Swartout is Director of Technology for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and a research professor of computer science at USC. His particular research interests include virtual humans, explanation and text generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, intelligent computer based education, [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Santosh Kumar Divvala
Carnegie Mellon University

Visual Subcategories

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis introduces the concept of visual subcategories. Many image understanding tasks such as object detection and image classification are formulated as binary classification problems, where the positive examples are instances (bounding boxes or images) of a specific object or scene category, and negative examples are background patches or images. Due [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Mark Palatucci
Carnegie Mellon University

Thought Recognition: Predicting and Decoding Brain Activity Using the Zero-Shot Learning Model

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Machine learning algorithms have been successfully applied to learning classifiers in many domains such as computer vision, fraud detection, and brain image analysis. Typically, classifiers are trained to predict a class value given a set of labeled training data that includes all possible class values, and sometimes additional unlabeled training data. [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Brian C. Becker
Carnegie Mellon University

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

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand [...]

RI Seminar
Pyry Matikainen
Carnegie Mellon University

Generating Representations for Action Recognition From Coarsely Labeled and Synthetic Data

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Action recognition techniques rely heavily on well chosen features, such as trajectory-based motion descriptors, to make the most of relatively scarce video training data. Typically these features must be hand-selected because the very paucity of suitably annotated data that makes the selection of features critical also restricts the degree to which [...]