VASC Seminar
Varun Ramakrishna
PhD Student RI
Carnegie Mellon

PoseMachines: Articulated Human 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 [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Natasha Kholgade
Carnegie Mellon University

3D Manipulation of Objects in Photographs

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis provides a system that allows users to interact with objects and human subjects in photographs in three dimensions. Current photo-editing tools provide a diverse array of operations in photographs. However, they are limited to the 2D plane of the image. The key contribution of this thesis is to leverage [...]

VASC Seminar
Menglong Zhu
PhD Candidate
University of Pennsylvania

Object Recognition from Active Detection to Accurate Pose Estimation

Event Location: 200 Smith HallBio: Menglong Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research focus is 2D and 3D object recognition and pose estimation. He is also interested in semantic localization, text recognition, and action recognition. He obtained his Master’s degree in [...]

RI Seminar
Marc Raibert
CTO & Director
Boston Dynamics

Walk, Bound, Gallop, Climb

Event Location: Rashid Auditorium, 4401 Gates Hillman CenterBio: Marc Raibert is CTO and founder of Boston Dynamics, a company that develops some of the world’s most advanced dynamic robots, such as BigDog, Atlas, Cheetah, SandFlea and the AlphaDog. These robots are inspired by the remarkable ability of animals to move with agility, mobility, speed and [...]

RI Seminar
Boris Sofman
Co-Founder & CEO
ANKI

Consumer Robotics: Story and Lessons

Event Location: Rashid Auditorium, 4401 Gates and Hillman CentersBio: As an engineer and researcher with experience in building diverse robotic systems — from consumer products to off-road autonomous vehicles and bomb-disposal robots — Boris is making it his life’s work to create products that people would not expect to be possible. He earned a B.S., [...]

VASC Seminar
Jay Aronson
Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society
Carnegie Mellon

Video Forensics: Extracting and Analyzing Information from Video about Human Rights, Conflict, and Disaster

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Jay Aronson is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching focus is on the interactions of science, technology, law, and human rights in a variety of contexts. He is currently engaged in a long-term study of the ethical, political, and social dimensions of [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Chris Cunningham
PhD Student
Robotics Institute

Fusion of Visual and Thermal Sensing for Traversability Prediction

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Chris Cunningham is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute advised by Red Whitaker. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 2012. His current research focuses on terrain classification and slip prediction for planetary robots.Abstract: Loose, granular soil can trap planetary rovers causing costly [...]

VASC Seminar
Min Sun
Postdoc, Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington

Large-scale image classification and video highlight retrieval

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Min Sun is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington (UW) working with Steve Seitz and Ali Farhadi. Before joining UW, he graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor with a Ph.D. degree and Stanford University with a M.Sc. degree. His [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Heather L. Jones
Carnegie Mellon University

View Trajectory Planning for Modeling Planetary Features under Transient Illumination

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: This research addresses the problem of planning views for modeling large, local, substantially 3D terrain features, such as skylights, at long range from surface rovers. Skylights, which are vertical cave entrances, and other pits have been identified in recent high-resolution images of the Moon and Mars. Planetary pits are interesting scientific [...]

RI Seminar
Sebastian Scherer
Systems Scientist, RI
Carnegie Mellon

Toward Autonomous Rotorcraft

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Sebastian Scherer is a Systems Scientist at the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research focuses on enabling autonomy for unmanned rotorcraft to operate at low altitude in cluttered environments. He and His team have shown the fastest and most tested obstacle avoidance on an Yamaha RMax (2006), [...]