Multiple Prediction Learning: Learning to Optimize Sequences via Submodular Maximization
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Increasingly, real world problems require multiple predictions. For instance in advertisement placement on the web, a list of advertisements is placed on a page with the objective of maximizing click- through rate. Traditionally machine learning has focused on producing a single best prediction. More generally, in this thesis, we build an [...]
Pose Inference Machines: Efficient and Accurate Human Pose Estimation from Images
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Fast and accurate human pose estimation enables a wide spectrum of applications from interactive control, markerless motion capture and gesture recognition to providing rich semantic information for higher level vision tasks such as scene understanding. The goal of this work is to develop an accurate and real-time human pose estimation system [...]
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 [...]