Calendar of Events
S Sun
M Mon
T Tue
W Wed
T Thu
F Fri
S Sat
0 events,
1 event,
Special Events
RI Picnic
RI Picnic
The RI Picnic will be held at the Vietnam Veteran's Pavilion @ Schenley Park on Overlook Drive, Tuesday, August 29, 1-7pm. SOCIALIZE, EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY! Receive this year's RI giveaway item; witness the exciting final rounds of the annual RI croquet tournament; enjoy lawn games right at our own pavilion area. Plan to spend some time at the […]
0 events,
1 event,
RI Event
Continual Robot Learning: Benchmarks and Modular Methods
Abstract: Humans adapt continuously to the world around us, allowing us to acquire new skills and explore diverse environments seamlessly. Current AI methods, however, cannot attain this versatility. Instead, they are typically trained with vast datasets, and learn all tasks simultaneously. However, the trained models have limited ability to adapt to changing contexts, and are […]
1 event,
MSR Thesis Defense
Architecture and Algorithms for Space-Based Global Wildlife Tracking
Abstract: Accurate satellite based positioning revolutionized several industries over the past two decades from agriculture to transportation. However, conventional GNSS receivers consume significant amounts of energy and are too large for many applications, including wildlife-tracking which is critical for conservation efforts and improving our understanding of the global climate. To address this capability gap, we [...]
0 events,
0 events,
0 events,
1 event,
PhD Thesis Defense
Multi-Human 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Videos
Abstract: We study the problem of multi-human 3D reconstruction from videos captured in the wild. Human movements are dynamic, and accurately reconstructing them in various settings is crucial for developing immersive social telepresence, assistive humanoid robots, and augmented reality systems. However, creating such a system requires addressing fundamental issues with previous works regarding the data [...]
0 events,
1 event,
MSR Thesis Defense
Language-Conditioned Object Detection and Manipulation
Abstract: Traditional object detection methods are often confined to predefined object vocabularies, limiting their versatility in real-world scenarios where robots need to understand and execute diverse household tasks. Additionally, the 2D and 3D perception communities have typically pursued separate approaches tailored to their respective domains. In this thesis, we present a language-conditioned object detector with [...]
1 event,
PhD Thesis Defense
How I Learned to Love Blobs: The Power of Gaussian Representations in Differentiable Rendering and Optimization
Abstract: In this thesis, we explore the use of Gaussian Representations in multiple application areas of computer vision and robotics. In particular, we design a ray-based differentiable renderer for 3D Gaussians that can be used to solve multiple classic computer vision problems in a unified manner. For example, we can reconstruct 3D shapes from color, [...]
0 events,
0 events,
2 events,
PhD Thesis Proposal
Watch, Practice, Improve: Towards In-the-wild Manipulation
Abstract: The longstanding dream of many roboticists is to see robots perform diverse tasks in diverse environments. To build such a robot that can operate anywhere, many methods train on robotic interaction data. While these approaches have led to significant advances, they rely on heavily engineered setups or high amounts of supervision, neither of which [...]
VASC Seminar
Aayush Bansal
Startup
Generating Beautiful Pixels
Abstract: In this talk, I will present three experiments that use low-level image statistics to generate high-resolution detailed outputs. In the first experiment, I will use 2D pixels to efficiently mine hard examples for better learning. Simply biasing ray sampling towards hard ray examples enables learning of neural fields with more accurate high-frequency detail in less [...]
1 event,
Special Events
Samay Kohli
GreyOrange
Founding a successful Robotics Startup
Join entrepreneur Samay Kohli as he traces his journey taking industrial robotics from university research to mass adoption. Kohli will reflect on key inflection points in scaling his company's solutions, including pivoting from individual robot products to an integrated system, building for variability in emerging markets, and aligning with industry needs. He'll discuss critical mindset shifts […]
0 events,
0 events,
1 event,
Faculty Events
Lightning talks – future research ideas
Lightning talks – future research ideas
In this faculty meeting, faculty will each present for 3 minutes on their future research plans.
0 events,
0 events,
1 event,
VASC Seminar
Viraj Prabhu
Georgia Institute of Technology
Towards Reliable Computer Vision Systems
Abstract: The real world has infinite visual variation – across viewpoints, time, space, and curation. As deep visual models become ubiquitous in high-stakes applications, their ability to generalize across such variation becomes increasingly important. In this talk, I will present opportunities to improve such generalization at different stages of the ML lifecycle: first, I will [...]
0 events,
1 event,
PhD Thesis Defense
Towards Photorealistic Dynamic Capture and Animation of Human Hair and Head
Abstract: Realistic human avatars play a key role in immersive virtual telepresence. To reach a high level of realism, a human avatar needs to faithfully reflect human appearance. A human avatar should also be drivable and express natural motions. Existing works have made significant progress in building drivable realistic face avatars, but they rarely include [...]
1 event,
PhD Thesis Defense
Modeling Dynamic Clothing for Data-Driven Photorealistic Avatars
Abstract: In this thesis, we aim to build photorealistic animatable avatars of humans wearing complex clothing in a data-driven manner. Such avatars will be a critical technology to enable future applications such as immersive telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Existing full-body avatars that jointly model geometry and view-dependent texture using Variational […]
1 event,
PhD Thesis Defense
Manipulation Among Movable Objects for Pick-and-Place Tasks in Cluttered 3D Workspaces
Abstract: In cluttered real-world workspaces, simple pick-and-place tasks for robot manipulators can be quite challenging to solve. Often there is no collision-free trajectory that allows the robot to grasp and extract a desired object from the scene. This requires motion planning algorithms to reason about rearranging some of the “movable” clutter in the scene so […]
0 events,
0 events,
2 events,
RI Seminar
Paul Debevec
Eyeline Studios
Transforming Hollywood Visual Effects with Graphics and Vision
Abstract: Paul will describe his path to developing visual effects technology used in hundreds of movies, including The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, Benjamin Button, Avatar, Maleficent, Furious 7, and Blade Runner: 2049. These techniques include image-based modeling and rendering, high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, and high-resolution facial scanning for photoreal digital actors. Paul will also […]
VASC Seminar
Bharath Hariharan
Cornell University
Vision without labels
Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized all aspects of computer vision, but its successes have come from supervised learning at scale: large models trained on ever larger labeled datasets. However this reliance on labels makes these systems fragile when it comes to new scenarios or new tasks where labels are unavailable. This is in stark contrast to […]