PhD Thesis Proposal
Wen-Sheng Chu
Carnegie Mellon University

From Supervised to Unsupervised Facial Action Discovery

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Facial actions speak louder than words. Facial actions can reveal a person's emotion, intention, and physical state; and make possible a range of applications that include market research, human-robot interaction, drowsiness detection, and clinical and developmental psychology research. In this proposal, we investigate both supervised and unsupervised approaches to facial action [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Neal Bhasin

Fuel-Optimal Spacecraft Guidance for Landing in Planetary Pits

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Neal Bhasin is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by Prof. Red Whittaker. Neal received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 2015 and has done research in the Planetary Robotics Lab since 2012. He served as team leader on the NASA funded instrument project "Flyover [...]

VASC Seminar
Matthias Niessner
Visiting Assistant Professor
Stanford

Reconstruction and Understanding of Indoor Environments

Event Location: Gates 8102Bio: Matthias Niessner is a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University. Previous to his appointment at Stanford, he earned his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany under the supervision of Günther Greiner. His research focuses on different fields of computer graphics and computer vision, including the reconstruction and semantic understanding of [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Tiffany Huang

Acoustic Structure from Motion

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Tiffany Huang is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. Michael Kaess. She received her B.S. with honors in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2014. Her current research focuses on perception and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms for autonomous [...]

VASC Seminar
Sanja Fidler
Assistant Professor
University of Toronto

Towards Understanding Stories from Videos

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Sanja Fidler is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Previously she was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located in the campus of the University of Chicago. She was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto during 2011-2012. [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Garrett Hemann

Long-range GPS-denied Aerial Inertial Navigation

Event Location: GHC 4405Bio: Garrett Hemann received his bachelors in Aerospace Engineering from MIT in 2011. During that time, he worked in CSAIL under Nick Roy working on control for indoor UAVs. After graduation, he worked at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab for 3 years. There he worked on control and multirobot coordination of monocopters, [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Heather L. Jones
Carnegie Mellon University

Using Planned View Trajectories to Build Good Models of Planetary Features under Transient Illumination

Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: This research addresses the modeling of substantially 3D planetary terrain features, such as skylights, canyons, craters, rocks, and mesas, by a surface robot. The sun lights planetary features with transient, directional illumination. For concave features like skylight pits, craters, and canyons, this can lead to dark shadows. For all terrain features, [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Eugene Fang

High-Fidelity Planetary Route Determination Using Computationally Efficient Monocular Fisheye Odometry and Sun Compass

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Eugene Fang is a M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by William “Red” Whittaker. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. His current research focuses on route determination for planetary rovers.Abstract: Today’s planetary robotic exploration is carried out by [...]

RI Seminar
Raj Madhavan
Founder and CEO
Humanitarian RoboticsTechnologies, LLC

Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technologies: Improving the Quality of Life for Humanity

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Raj Madhavan is the Founder & CEO of Humanitarian Robotics Technologies, LLC, Maryland, U.S.A. and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Robotics with AMMACHI Labs at Amrita University, Kerala, India. He has held appointments with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (March 2001-January 2010) as an R&D staff member based at the National [...]

VASC Seminar
Andrew Owens
Ph.D. Student at MIT CSAIL
MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sound provides supervision for visual learning

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Andrew Owens is a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working under the supervision of Bill Freeman and Antonio Torralba. Before that, he obtained his B.A. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 2010. He is a recipient of a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, [...]