- Date: November 20, 2019
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave a seminar lecture at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Colloquium of the University of Connecticut. The talk described novel reinforcement algorithms based on combining physical models with non-parametric models of robotic systems derived from data.
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- Date: November 9, 2019
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - Takaaki Hori has been elected to serve on the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for a 3-year term.
The SLTC promotes and influences all the technical areas of speech and language processing such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding, speech to speech translation, spoken dialog management, speech indexing, information extraction from audio, and speaker and language recognition.
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- Date: October 17, 2019
Awarded to: Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs
MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips Brief - MERL received Cultural Vista's Global Partnership Award at the 2019 Cultural Vistas Awards Gala (#CVGala)in NYC in October. This event brought together more than 250 leaders from across the business, education, government, and diplomatic communities for a special evening recognizing leadership in advancing global skills and understanding.
The Global Partnership award recognizes MERL's exemplary contributions to advancing friendship, understanding, and effective collaboration between the United States and Japan.
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- Date: November 8, 2019
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - Anthony Vetro has been appointed for a two-year term as a Senior Area Editor of the new IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing.
This fully open access journal will publish high-quality, peer-reviewed papers covering the enabling technology for the generation, transformation, extraction, and interpretation of information. It comprises the theory, algorithms with associated architectures and implementations, and applications related to processing information contained in many different formats broadly designated as signals.
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- Date: October 27, 2019
Awarded to: Abhinav Kumar, Tim K. Marks, Wenxuan Mou, Chen Feng, Xiaoming Liu
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim Marks, former MERL interns Abhinav Kumar and Wenxuan Mou, and MERL consultants Professor Chen Feng (NYU) and Professor Xiaoming Liu (MSU) received the Best Oral Paper Award at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019 Workshop on Statistical Deep Learning in Computer Vision (SDL-CV) held in Seoul, Korea. Their paper, entitled "UGLLI Face Alignment: Estimating Uncertainty with Gaussian Log-Likelihood Loss," describes a method which, given an image of a face, estimates not only the locations of facial landmarks but also the uncertainty of each landmark location estimate.
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- Date: October 10, 2019
Awarded to: Devesh Jha, Nurali Virani, Zhenyuan Yuan, Ishana Shekhawat and Asok Ray
MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researcher Devesh Jha has won the Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award 2019 for the paper entitled "Imitation of Demonstrations Using Bayesian Filtering With Nonparametric Data-Driven Models". This paper, published in a Special Commemorative Issue for Rudolf E. Kalman in the ASME JDSMC in March 2018, uses Bayesian filtering for imitation learning in Hidden Mode Hybrid Systems. This award is given annually by the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME to the authors of the best paper published in the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems Measurement and Control during the preceding year.
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- Date: October 1, 2019 - October 4, 2019
MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips Brief - MERL and parent company, Mitsubishi Electric were proud sponsors of the Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando. We had the great pleasure to meet many talented women who exuded passion for technology. With over 25,000+ attendees, the energy was electric and contagious.
MERL recognizes diversity and inclusion not only as an important priority, but a game changer in the industry. We left #GHC2019 feeling inspired to continuously encourage women in tech and to remind them-they are already changing the world.
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- Date: October 21, 2019 - October 23, 2019
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, of MERL's Data Analytics group, and collaborators will present 4 invited talks at 2019 Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) Annual Meeting. The talks cover a broad range of topics including decision diagrams, algorithms for mixed integer quadratic, applications in transportation and integration of prescriptive and predictive analytics.
INFORMS is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting best practices and advances in operations research, management science, and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making, and outcomes. INFORMS Annual Meeting is a premier annual conference bringing together researchers and practitioners in operations research and management science.
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- Date: October 1, 2019
Brief - Rui Ma has been invited to join the editorial team of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques as an Associate Editor.
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- Date: September 25, 2019
Where: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY
MERL Contact: Scott A. Bortoff
Research Areas: Control, Multi-Physical Modeling
Brief - The seminar, entitled “HVAC System Control and Optimization,” was part of the Mercer Distinguished Lecture Series in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY. Given on Wednesday September 25, 2019, it focused on the systems engineering and control issues associated with highly integrated Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Systems for low and zero energy buildings.
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- Date: September 22, 2019 - September 26, 2019
MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Optimization, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL Optical Team scientists will be presenting 5 papers including 2 invited talks at the 45th European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2019, which is being held in Dublin from September 22-26, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in sophisticated constellation shaping schemes, lattice coding, and deep learning-based turbo equalization to mitigate fiber nonlinearity. Dr. Kojima is giving an invited workshop talk on deep learning-based nano-photonic device optimization. Dr. Tobias Fehenberger, a former Visiting Scientist is giving an invited talk related to our joint paper "Mapping Strategies for Short-Length Probabilistic Shaping"
ECOC is the largest optical communications event in Europe and a key meeting place for more than 1,500 scientists and researchers from institutions and companies across the world. The conference features more than 400 oral and poster presentations from various major telecoms industries and universities. As well as being one of the largest scientific conferences globally, ECOC also features Europe’s largest optical communications exhibition.
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- Date: September 15, 2019 - September 19, 2019
Where: Graz, Austria
MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Speech & Audio Team researchers will be presenting 7 papers at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association INTERSPEECH 2019, which is being held in Graz, Austria from September 15-19, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in end-to-end speech recognition, speech separation, and audio-visual scene-aware dialog. Takaaki Hori is also co-presenting a tutorial on end-to-end speech processing.
Interspeech is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. It gathers around 2000 participants from all over the world.
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- Date: August 19, 2019 - August 23, 2019
Where: AI for Engineering Summer School 2019
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty, a Visiting Research Scientist in MERL's Control and Dynamical Systems group, gave an invited talk at the AI for Engineering Summer School 2019 hosted by Autodesk. The talk briefly described MERL's research areas, and focused on Dr. Chakrabarty's work at MERL (with collaborators from the CD and DA group) on the use of supervised learning for verification of control systems with simulators/neural nets in the loop, and on constraint-enforcing reinforcement learning. Other speakers at the event included researchers from various academic and industrial research facilities including U Toronto, UW-Seattle, Carnegie Mellon U, the Vector Institute, and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
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- Date: July 9, 2019
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Area: Communications
Brief - MERL researchers presented an invited talk at OptElectronics and Communications Conference (OECC), held at Fukuoka, Japan. The speech focused on recent advancement of error correction coding based on polar codes and suited for hardware implementation in high-speed optical communications.
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- Date: July 10, 2019 - July 12, 2019
Where: Philadelphia
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Karl Berntorp; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Devesh K. Jha; Yebin Wang; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the American Control Conference, MERL presented 8 papers on subjects including model predictive control applications, estimation and motion planning for vehicles, modular control architectures, and adaptation and learning.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, July 16, 2019; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Jeff Linderoth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
MERL Host: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Machine Learning, Optimization
Abstract 
Algorithms to solve mixed integer linear programs have made incredible progress in the past 20 years. Key to these advances has been a mathematical analysis of the structure of the set of feasible solutions. We argue that a similar analysis is required in the case of mixed integer quadratic programs, like those that arise in sparse optimization in machine learning. One such analysis leads to the so-called perspective relaxation, which significantly improves solution performance on separable instances. Extensions of the perspective reformulation can lead to algorithms that are equivalent to some of the most popular, modern, sparsity-inducing non-convex regularizations in variable selection. Based on joint work with Hongbo Dong (Washington State Univ. ), Oktay Gunluk (IBM), and Kun Chen (Univ. Connecticut).
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- Date: June 25, 2019 - June 28, 2019
Where: Naples, Italy
MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Devesh K. Jha; Christopher R. Laughman; Daniel N. Nikovski; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - The European Control Conference is the premier control conference in Europe. This year MERL was well represented with papers on control for HVAC, machine learning for estimation and control, robot assembly, and optimization methods for control.
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- Date: July 4, 2019
Where: University of Edinburgh
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, of MERL's Data Analytics group, will deliver a keynote titled "Embedding Perfect Structures in Process Systems" in the School of Engineering at University of Edinburgh. Abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date: July 2, 2019
Where: Imperial College London
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, of MERL's Data Analytics group, will deliver a seminar titled "Chordal Completions – Semidefinite Programming and Minimum Completions" in the Computational Optimisation Group at Imperial College London. Abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2019; 12:00PM
Location: 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
Speaker: Beverly Shultz
MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips Brief - MERL hosted its annual "Women In Science Luncheon" to celebrate and inspire the Lab's team of female researchers, PhD student interns and members of the HQ staff. Beverly Shultz, author of "Skip the Typing Test, I’ll Manage the Software-A Woman’s Pioneering Journey in High Tech” joined the event to share her insights as a successful female engineer, who brought passion and technology business acumen to the male-dominated computer revolution.
Beverly was a former Vice President of Engineering at Mitsubishi Electric of America and responsible to produce several versions of an early volume rendering product. She was the first female recipient of the MELCO’s President’s Award for Technology, for this work.
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- Date: June 10, 2019 - June 14, 2019
Where: Paris
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Stefano Di Cairano and Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky, Dept. Aerospace Engineering, the University of Michigan, were invited to teach a class on "Predictive and Optimization Based Control for Automotive and Aerospace Application" at the 2019 International Graduate School in Control, of the European Embedded Control Institute (EECI). Every year EECI invites world renown experts to teach 21-hours class modules, mostly for PhD students but also for professionals, on selected control subjects. Stefano and Ilya's class was attended by 30 "students" from both academia and industry, from all around the world, interested in automotive and aerospace control. The module described the fundamentals of modeling and control design in automotive and aerospace through lectures, real world examples and exercises, and placed particular emphasis on techniques such as MPC, reference governors, and optimal control.
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- Date: June 12, 2019
Where: Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics – Published 22 Feb 2019
MERL Contact: Chungwei Lin
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Multi-Physical Modeling
Brief - The journal "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (PCCP)" selects a few well-received articles highlighted as HOT by the handling editor or referees. The following paper "Band Alignment in Quantum Wells from Automatically Tuned DFT+U" with MERL authors Grigory Kolesov, Chungwei Lin, Andrew Knyazev, Keisuke Kojima, Joseph Katz has been selected as a 2019 HOT Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics article, and is made free to access until the end of July 2019. This paper provides a semi-empirical methodology to compute the lattice and electronic structures of systems composed of 400+ atoms. The efficiency of this method allows for realistic simulations of interfaces between semiconductors, which is nearly impossible using the existing methods due to the extremely large degrees of freedom involved. The formalism is tested against a few established band alignments and then applied to determine the band gaps of quantum wells; the agreement is within the experimental uncertainty.
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- Date & Time: July 29, 2019; 10 AM
Where: US National Congress on Computational Mechanics 2019, in Austin Texas
MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
Brief - MERL researcher Mouhacine Benosman will present his work on 'Learning-based Robust Stabilization for Reduced-Order Models of 3D Boussinesq Equations' as a keynote speaker at the mini-symposium 'Data assimilation in Model Order Techniques for Computational Mechanics', during the next US National Congress on Computational Mechanics 2019, in Austin Texas.
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- Date: May 22, 2019
Awarded to: Siriramya Bhamidipati, Kyeong Jin Kim, Hongbo Sun, Philip Orlik
MERL Contact: Hongbo Sun
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Information Security
Brief - MERL researchers, Kyeong Jin Kim, Hongbo Sun, Philip Orlik, along with lead author and former MERL intern Siriramya Bhamidipati were awarded the Smart Grid Symposium Best Paper Award at this year's International Conference on Communications (ICC) held in Shanghai, China. There paper titled "GPS Spoofing Detection and Mitigation in PMUs Using Distributed Multiple Directional Antennas," described a technique to rapidly detect and mitigate GPS timing attacks/errors via hardware (antennas) and signal processing (Kalman Filtering).
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- Date: April 15, 2019
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
Brief - Stefano Di Cairano, senior team leader and distinguished research scientist in the Control and Dynamical Systems group, was interviewed in the April 2019 issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine. Stefano described himself, promising opportunities in the control field, and how his passion for control research fits well into the industrial research laboratory setting at MERL. It is very good reading for any young researcher considering possible career trajectories.
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