News & Events

1,299 News items and Awards found.


  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented at the IFAC workshop on control applications of optimization, 2015
    Date: October 6, 2015
    Where: IFAC workshop on control applications of optimization 2015
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Andrew Knyazev and Alexander Malyshev gave two talks at the IFAC workshop on control applications of optimization, 2015. The papers were published by Elsevier B.V. in the conference proceedings.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2015
    Date: September 18, 2015
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2015
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • MERL researchers A. Knyazev and A. Malyshev gave a talk at the IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2015. The paper was published at the IEEE Xplore conference proceedings.
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  •  NEWS    Scene interpretation results of SA group members are listed as the leader of benchmark competition
    Date: July 13, 2015 - July 17, 2015
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • SA group members (M. Liu, S. Lin (intern), S. Ramalingam, O. Tuzel) presented a paper at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Rome July 13-17 called 'Layered Interpretation of Street View Images'. The results they reported are now listed as the leader of the benchmark competition sponsored by Daimler. [Note that at that URL ref 2 is from collaboration with Daimler and it uses a FPGA for high speed, whereas MERL result is obtained with desktop computer and GPU.].
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  •  NEWS    3D microscopy work of MERL researcher featured in Nature article
    Date: July 23, 2015
    Brief
    • Work by MERL researcher, Ulugbek Kamilov, has been reviewed in the "News & Views" section of Nature. The work, which was part of his doctoral dissertation at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, describes a framework to reconstruct the 3D refractive index of an object by solving a large-scale optimization problem that considers how light propagates through a medium. Results have been shown for 3D imaging of biological cells, but the solution to such inverse problems have the potential to be applied to a much wider set of imaging problems, such as seeing through fog, murky water or even human tissue.
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  •  NEWS    Shinji Watanabe publishes new book on Bayesian Speech and Language Processing
    Date: July 15, 2015
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • A new book on Bayesian Speech and Language Processing has been published by MERL researcher, Shinji Watanabe, and research collaborator, Jen-Tzung Chien, a professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

      With this comprehensive guide you will learn how to apply Bayesian machine learning techniques systematically to solve various problems in speech and language processing. A range of statistical models is detailed, from hidden Markov models to Gaussian mixture models, n-gram models and latent topic models, along with applications including automatic speech recognition, speaker verification, and information retrieval. Approximate Bayesian inferences based on MAP, Evidence, Asymptotic, VB, and MCMC approximations are provided as well as full derivations of calculations, useful notations, formulas, and rules. The authors address the difficulties of straightforward applications and provide detailed examples and case studies to demonstrate how you can successfully use practical Bayesian inference methods to improve the performance of information systems. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and industry practitioners working in machine learning, signal processing, and speech and language processing.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers present 10 papers at the American Controls Conference
    Date: July 3, 2015
    MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Yebin Wang; Stefano Di Cairano; Arvind Raghunathan; Avishai Weiss
    Brief
    • MERL researchers presented 10 papers at the American Controls Conference, in Chicago, USA. The ACC is one of the most important conferences on control systems in the world. Topics ranged from theoretical, including new algorithms for Model Predictive Control and Co-Design, to applications including spacecraft control and HVAC systems.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researcher's spam filter finds automobile safety defects at NHTSA
    Date: June 25, 2015
    MERL Contact: William S. Yerazunis
    Research Area: Data Analytics
    Brief
    • The CRM114 Discriminator, an open-source spam filter / text classifier created by William Yerazunis in MERL's Data Analytics group, continues to turn up in interesting places - and apparently one of them is in the US Department of Transportation's process for analysis of car safety defect reports.

      Although CRM114 is usually used as a spam filter, CRM114 has been used to analyze resumes for jobseekers, scanning outgoing emails to detect accidental confidential information leaks, perusing blogs for relevance, scanning syslog files for interesting events, and now, apparently, searching complaints sent to NHTSA to find safety-related vehicle malfunctions.
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  •  NEWS    EC researchers and intern receive "Best Student Poster Award" at EDSCC 2015
    Date: June 4, 2015
    MERL Contact: Koon Hoo Teo
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
    Brief
    • Li Zhu, Koon Hoo Teo and Qun Gao's paper, 'Dynamic On-resistance and Tunneling Based De-trapping in GaN HEMT,' was awarded the "Best Student Poster Award" at the IEEE International Conference on Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits (EDSSC) 2015.
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  •  NEWS    EC Researcher elected as Vice Chair of the IEEE Boston Section MTT-S Chapter
    Date: June 1, 2015
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Rui Ma has been elected as Vice Chair of the IEEE Boston Section Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Chapter.
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  •  NEWS    MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers presented at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015
    Date: July 13, 2015
    Where: SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers presented talks at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015. The papers were published by SIAM in the conference proceedings.
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  •  NEWS    EC Researchers presented paper at WPT 2015 Conference
    Date: May 13, 2015 - May 15, 2015
    MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis; Koon Hoo Teo
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
    Brief
    • Description: Bingnan Wang presented a paper, 'Circularly Polarized Near Field for Resonant Wireless Power Transfer' at the recently held IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference in Boulder, Colorado from May 13-15, 2015.
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  •  NEWS    EC Researchers presented 2 papers at CLEO 2015 Conference
    Date: May 10, 2015 - May 15, 2015
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
    Research Area: Communications
    Brief
    • Toshiaki Koike-Akino presented 'LDPC-coded 16-dimensional modulation based on the Nordstrom--Robinson nonlinear block code,' and 'Phase noise-robust LLR calculation with linear/bilinear transform for LDPC-coded coherent communications,' at the recently held CLEO conference in San Jose, CA.
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  •  NEWS    MERL presented a paper at ICCS meeting
    Date: June 1, 2015
    Where: International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS)
    Brief
    • Andrew Knyazev gave a talk at the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), 2015 on Nonsymmetric preconditioning for conjugate gradient and steepest descent methods. The paper was published by Elsevier B.V. in the conference proceedings.
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  •  NEWS    John Hershey gives talk at MIT on Deep Unfolding
    Date: April 28, 2015
    Brief
    • MERL researcher and speech team leader, John Hershey, gave a talk at MIT entitled, "Deep Unfolding: Deriving Novel Deep Network Architectures from Model-based Inference Methods" on April 28, 2015.

      Abstract: Model-based methods and deep neural networks have both been tremendously successful paradigms in machine learning. In model-based methods, problem domain knowledge can be built into the constraints of the model, typically at the expense of difficulties during inference. In contrast, deterministic deep neural networks are constructed in such a way that inference is straightforward, but their architectures are rather generic and it can be unclear how to incorporate problem domain knowledge. This work aims to obtain some of the advantages of both approaches. To do so, we start with a model-based approach and unfold the iterations of its inference method to form a layer-wise structure. This results in novel neural-network-like architectures that incorporate our model-based constraints, but can be trained discriminatively to perform fast and accurate inference. This framework allows us to view conventional sigmoid networks as a special case of unfolding Markov random field inference, and leads to other interesting generalizations. We show how it can be applied to other models, such as non-negative matrix factorization, to obtain a new kind of non-negative deep neural network that can be trained using a multiplicative back propagation-style update algorithm. In speech enhancement experiments we show that our approach is competitive with conventional neural networks, while using fewer parameters.
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  •  NEWS    Nikkei reports on Mitsubishi Electric speech recognition
    Date: April 20, 2015
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric researcher, Yuuki Tachioka of Japan, and MERL researcher, Shinji Watanabe, presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP) entitled, "A Discriminative Method for Recurrent Neural Network Language Models". This paper describes a discriminative (language modelling) method for Japanese speech recognition. The Japanese Nikkei newspapers and some other press outlets reported on this method and its performance for Japanese speech recognition tasks.
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  •  NEWS    Multimedia Group researchers presented 8 papers at ICASSP 2015
    Date: April 19, 2015 - April 24, 2015
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Hassan Mansour; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Brief
    • Multimedia Group researchers have presented 8 papers at the recent IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing, which was held in Brisbane, Australia from April 19-24, 2015.
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  •  NEWS    Anthony Vetro appointed as Chair of INCITS L3
    Date: April 16, 2015
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • The INCITS L3 technical committee is the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC29, which includes the JPEG and MPEG working groups. The technical committee is responsible for providing recommendations on US positions pertaining to the coding of audio, picture, multimedia, and hypermedia information. Anthony Vetro has been appointed as Chair of the L3 committee for a 3-year term from April 2015 to 2018.
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  •  AWARD    INCITS Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management
    Date: April 14, 2015
    Awarded to: Anthony Vetro
    Awarded by: InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS)
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • The INCITS Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management recognizes individuals who, as officers, have provided outstanding leadership to the subgroup in its national and/or international work, have demonstrated proficiency in achieving consensus in the national and/or international arenas and have followed the approved procedures in an exemplary fashion. Anthony Vetro was the recipient of this award in 2015. He has more than 15 years of participation in standards development, including service as the INCITS L3.1 Vice-Chair and Chair and an active technical participant in the MPEG committee.
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  •  NEWS    Robert Cohen appointed to the Industrial Relations Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
    Date: April 1, 2015
    Brief
    • MERL researcher, Robert Cohen, was appointed to the Industrial Relations Committee for a 3-year term from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2017. This committee is responsible for maintaining and improving relations between the IEEE Signal Processing Society and industry members.
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  •  NEWS    Papers presented at OFC 2015 optical communications conference
    Date: March 25, 2015
    MERL Contacts: Kieran Parsons; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Six papers from the Optical Comms team will be presented at the 2015 Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) being held in LA, USA in March 2015. The papers relate to high-dimensional modulation, signal processing, coding for coherent optical links and semiconductor laser linewidth measurement.
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  •  NEWS    Petros Boufounos appointed to the SigPort Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
    Date: March 1, 2015
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • Signal Processing Repository (SigPort) is an online repository of manuscripts, reports, technical white papers, theses, and supporting materials. Created and supported by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), SigPort collects technical material of interests to the broad signal processing community. It hosts material to help individuals obtain early and broad exposure on their work. MERL researcher, Petros Boufounos, was appointed to the SigPort Board for a 3-year term from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2017.
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Spectrum's "Cars That Think" highlights MERL's speech enhancement research
    Date: March 9, 2015
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • Recent research on speech enhancement by MERL's Speech and Audio team was highlighted in "Cars That Think", IEEE Spectrum's blog on smart technologies for cars. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest association of technical professionals with more than 400,000 members.
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  •  NEWS    MERL's noise suppression technology featured in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation press release
    Date: February 17, 2015
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has developed breakthrough noise-suppression technology that significantly improves the quality of hands-free voice communication in noisy conditions, such as making a voice call via a car navigation system. Speech clarity is improved by removing 96% of surrounding sounds, including rapidly changing noise from turn signals or wipers, which are difficult to suppress using conventional methods. The technology is based on recent research on speech enhancement by MERL's Speech and Audio team. .
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  •  NEWS    3D reconstruction on Tokyo TV
    Date: February 20, 2015
    Research Area: Computer Vision
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  •  NEWS    MERL participates in IPXI 802.11n joint offering
    Date: October 1, 2014
    Where: Intellectual Property Exchange InternationaI (IPXI)
    Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Intellectual Property Exchange International, Inc. (IPXI), the world's first financial exchange for licensing and trading intellectual property (IP) rights, today announced a multi-party offering for standard essential patents (SEPs) involving the world's most widely adopted standard protocol for wireless technology. The offering of Unit License Right™ (ULR™) contracts is based on patent rights from eight organizations—including MERL and other leading consumer electronics and telecommunications companies, universities and research laboratories—whose rights are considered essential to the IEEE 802.11n standard for higher throughput in wireless local area network (WLAN) communications.
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