News & Events

1,299 News items and Awards found.


  •  NEWS    MERL work on scene-aware interaction featured in IEEE Spectrum
    Date: March 1, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Tim K. Marks; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL's research on scene-aware interaction was recently featured in an IEEE Spectrum article. The article, titled "At Last, A Self-Driving Car That Can Explain Itself" and authored by MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Chiori Hori and MERL Director Anthony Vetro, gives an overview of MERL's efforts towards developing a system that can analyze multimodal sensing information for highly natural and intuitive interaction with humans through context-dependent generation of natural language. The technology recognizes contextual objects and events based on multimodal sensing information, such as images and video captured with cameras, audio information recorded with microphones, and localization information measured with LiDAR.

      Scene-Aware Interaction for car navigation, one target application that the article focuses on, will provide drivers with intuitive route guidance. Scene-Aware Interaction technology is expected to have wide applicability, including human-machine interfaces for in-vehicle infotainment, interaction with service robots in building and factory automation systems, systems that monitor the health and well-being of people, surveillance systems that interpret complex scenes for humans and encourage social distancing, support for touchless operation of equipment in public areas, and much more. MERL's Scene-Aware Interaction Technology had previously been featured in a Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release.

      IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. IEEE Spectrum has a circulation of over 400,000 engineers worldwide, making it one of the leading science and engineering magazines.
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  •  NEWS    Rien Quirynen appointed as an Associate Editor for Journal of Optimal Control Applications and Methods (OCAM)
    Date: February 24, 2022
    Research Areas: Control, Optimization
    Brief
    • Rien Quirynen has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Journal of Optimal Control Applications and Methods (OCAM) as an Associate Editor.

      OCAM provides a forum for papers on the full range of optimal control and related control design methods. The aim is to encourage new developments in optimal control theory and design methodologies that may lead to advances in real control applications.
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  •  NEWS    Dr. Benosman is invited to give the mini-course in control theory at the 2022 edition of the Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control
    Date: July 5, 2022 - July 7, 2022
    MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
    Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • The Benelux meeting is an annual conference gathering of the scientific community of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg around systems and control. It is especially intended for PhD researchers and a number of activities are dedicated to them, including plenary talks and a mini-course.

      Dr. Benosman has been invited to give the mini-course of the 2022 edition of the conference. This course, entitled 'A hybrid approach to control: classical control theory meets machine learning theory', will be centered around the topic of safe and robust machine learning-based control.
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  •  NEWS    Radu Corcodel joins the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology
    Date: February 3, 2022
    MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
    Research Areas: Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
    Brief
    • Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's computer vision group, has been invited to join the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology. This committee defines standard terms relevant to human-robot interaction in service, social, education, industrial, and research robotic applications. It establishes and defines a common terminology for practitioners and users of human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies. It is also intended to address issues common within the field of HRI, particularly surrounding the use of inconsistent and/or conflicting terms and definitions.

      The invitation is a recognition of Radu's excellent record of robotics research and a significant opportunity for him to contribute to new standards in robotics terminology.
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  •  NEWS    Arvind Raghunathan to serve on The Howard Rosenbrock Prize committee
    Date: May 31, 2022
    MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
    Research Area: Optimization
    Brief
    • Arvind Raghunathan from MERL's Data Analytics group has been invited to serve on the The Howard Rosenbrock Prize committee. Instituted in 2015, Optimization and Engineering journal's Howard Rosenbrock Prize is awarded annually to honor the authors of the best paper published in the journal in the previous year.
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  •  NEWS    Jonathan Le Roux discusses MERL's audio source separation work on popular machine learning podcast
    Date: January 24, 2022
    Where: The TWIML AI Podcast
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL Speech & Audio Senior Team Leader Jonathan Le Roux was featured in an extended interview on the popular TWIML AI Podcast, presenting MERL's work towards solving the "cocktail party problem". Humans have the extraordinary ability to focus on particular sounds of interest within a complex acoustic scene, such as a cocktail party. MERL's Speech & Audio Team has been at the forefront of the field's effort to develop algorithms giving machines similar abilities. Jonathan talked with host Sam Charrington about the group's decade-long journey on this topic, from early pioneering work using deep learning for speech enhancement and speech separation, to recent works on weakly-supervised separation, hierarchical sound separation, as well as the separation of real-world soundtracks into speech, music, and sound effects (aka the "cocktail fork problem").

      The TWIML AI podcast, formerly known as This Week in Machine Learning & AI, was created in 2016 and is followed by more than 10,000 subscribers on Youtube and Twitter. Jonathan's interview marks the 555th episode of the podcast.
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  •  AWARD    Joshua Rapp wins Best Dissertation Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society
    Date: December 20, 2021
    Awarded to: Joshua Rapp
    MERL Contact: Joshua Rapp
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Joshua Rapp has won the 2021 Best PhD Dissertation Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
      The award recognizes a PhD thesis completed on a signal processing subject within the past three years for its relevant work in signal processing while stimulating further research in the field.

      Dr. Rapp completed his PhD at Boston University in 2020 with a thesis entitled "Probabilistic Modeling for Single-Photon Lidar." The dissertation tackles challenges of the acquisition and processing of 3D depth maps reconstructed from time-of-flight data captured one photon at a time.
      The award will be presented at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in France.
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  •  NEWS    Uroš Kalabić joins editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
    Date: December 14, 2021
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Uroš Kalabić has been appointed to serve as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

      The Transactions on Control Systems Technology bridge the gap between the theory and practice of control engineering. They feature publications on engineering needed to implement practical control systems.
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  •  NEWS    Toshiaki Koike-Akino Gives Seminar Talk at IEEE Boston Photonics
    Date & Time: December 9, 2021; 7pm EST
    Where: virtual
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Signal Processing group, Network Intelligence Team) is giving an invited talk titled, `Evolution of Machine Learning for Photonic Research' for the Boston Photonic Chapter of the IEEE Photonic Society on December 9. The talk covers recent MERL research on machine learning for nonlinearity compensation and nanophotonic device design.
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  •  AWARD    Petros Boufounos Elevated to IEEE Fellow
    Date: January 1, 2022
    Awarded to: Petros T. Boufounos
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL’s Petros Boufounos has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 2022, for “contributions to compressed sensing.”

      IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
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  •  AWARD    Toshiaki Koike-Akino elected Fellow of Optica
    Date: November 18, 2021
    Awarded to: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Toshiaki Koike-Akino's research activities in communications, error control coding and optical technologies at MERL have earned him election as a Fellow Member of Optica (formerly OSA), the foremost professional association in optics and photonics worldwide. Fellow membership in Optica is limited to no more than ten percent of the membership and is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Koike-Akino is one of 106 members from 24 countries in Optica’s 2022 Fellows Class, elected during the Board of Directors of Optica meeting held on 2nd of November, 2021.

      “Congratulations to the 2022 Optica Fellows,” said 2021 President Connie Chang-Hasnain, University of California, Berkeley, USA. “These members exemplify what it means to be a leader in optics and photonics. Your election, by your peers, confirms the important contributions made within our field. Thank you for your dedication to Optica, and for advancing the science of light.”

      Koike-Akino's elevation to Fellow is specifically “for outstanding and innovative contributions to R&D in enabling technologies for optical communications, including nonlinear equalizers, high-dimensional modulations, and FEC (Forward Error Correction),” said Meredith Smith, Director, Optica Awards and Honors Office. "Again, congratulations on joining this esteemed group of Optica members."

      About Optica

      Optica (formerly OSA) is dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in optics and photonics worldwide. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica’s renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement.
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  •  AWARD    Mitsubishi Electric US Receives a 2022 CES Innovation Award for Touchless Elevator Control Jointly Developed with MERL
    Date: November 17, 2021
    Awarded to: Elevators and Escalators Division of Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc.
    MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; William S. Yerazunis
    Research Areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • The Elevators and Escalators Division of Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. has been recognized as a 2022 CES® Innovation Awards honoree for its new PureRide™ Touchless Control for elevators, jointly developed with MERL. Sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the CES Innovation Awards is the largest and most influential technology event in the world. PureRide™ Touchless Control provides a simple, no-touch product that enables users to call an elevator and designate a destination floor by placing a hand or finger over a sensor. MERL initiated the development of PureRide™ in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic by proposing the use of infra-red sensors for operating elevator call buttons, and participated actively in its rapid implementation and commercialization, resulting in a first customer installation in October of 2020.
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  •  AWARD    MERL Ranked 1st Place in Cross-Subject Transfer Learning Task and 4th Place Overall at the NeurIPS2021 BEETL Competition for EEG Transfer Learning.
    Date: November 11, 2021
    Awarded to: Niklas Smedemark-Margulies, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Deniz Erdogmus
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Signal Processing, Human-Computer Interaction
    Brief
    • The MERL Signal Processing group achieved first place in the cross-subject transfer learning task and fourth place overall in the NeurIPS 2021 BEETL AI Challenge for EEG Transfer Learning. The team included Niklas Smedemark-Margulies (intern from Northeastern University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Prof. Deniz Erdogmus (Northeastern University). The challenge addresses two types of transfer learning tasks for EEG Biosignals: a homogeneous transfer learning task for cross-subject domain adaptation; and a heterogeneous transfer learning task for cross-data domain adaptation. There were 110+ registered teams in this competition, MERL ranked 1st in the homogeneous transfer learning task, 7th place in the heterogeneous transfer learning task, and 4th place for the combined overall score. For the homogeneous transfer learning task, MERL developed a new pre-shot learning framework based on feature disentanglement techniques for robustness against inter-subject variation to enable calibration-free brain-computer interfaces (BCI). MERL is invited to present our pre-shot learning technique at the NeurIPS 2021 workshop.
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  •  NEWS    Keynote Speech by Dr. Rui Ma at EDICON2021
    Date: December 10, 2021
    Research Areas: Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • MERL's Researcher Dr. Rui Ma is the keynote speaker for Electronic Design Innovation CON (EDICON2021) to be held in Shenzhen, China from Dec. 9-10, with a talk titled "Digitization and intelligence: unlocking the innovation of future radios". The conference brings together international researchers from academics, industry, and media distribution to share perspectives on the technology needed and being developed for the next generation of communication.
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  •  NEWS    Anthony Vetro elected to serve on Board of Governors of IEEE Signal Processing Society
    Date: November 4, 2021
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro has been elected as a Member-at-Large to serve on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He will serve a three-year term from January 2022 until December 2024.

      The Board of Governors (BoG) is the governing body that oversees the activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The SPS BoG has the responsibility of establishing and implementing policy, and receiving reports from its standing boards and committees. Members-at-Large represent the member view point in the Board decision-making. They typically review, discuss, and act upon a wide range of items affecting the actions, activities, and health of the Society.
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  •  NEWS    Ankush Chakrabarty gave an invited talk at CRAN: Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy, France
    Date: October 21, 2021
    Where: Université de Lorraine, France
    MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
    Brief
    • Ankush Chakrabarty (RS, Multiphysical Systems Team) gave an invited talk on `Bayesian-Optimized Estimation and Control for Buildings and HVAC' at the Research Center for Automatic Control (CRAN) in the University of Lorraine in France. The talk presented recent MERL research on probabilistic machine learning for set-point optimization and calibration of digital twins for building energy systems.
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  •  AWARD    Daniel Nikovski receives Outstanding Reviewer Award at NeurIPS'21
    Date: October 18, 2021
    Awarded to: Daniel Nikovski
    MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • Daniel Nikovski, Group Manager of MERL's Data Analytics group, has received an Outstanding Reviewer Award from the 2021 conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'21). NeurIPS is the world's premier conference on neural networks and related technologies.
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  •  NEWS    Diego Romeres appointed as Associate Editor at ICRA 2022.
    Date: September 17, 2021 - October 31, 2021
    MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Researcher Kyeong Jin Kim organizes a workshop in 2022 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
    Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
    Where: 2022 IEEE ICC
    Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Signal Processing Group, organizes a workshop in 2022 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The workshop is titled, "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks," and aims to bring researchers for technical discussion on fundamental and practically relevant questions to many emerging challenges in industrial private wireless networks. This workshop is also being organized with the help of other researchers from Huawei Technology, Princeton University, Aalborg University, Jinan University, and South China University of Technology. IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society's flagship conferences.
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  •  NEWS    Anoop Cherian gave an invited talk at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, UK
    Date: September 7, 2021
    MERL Contact: Anoop Cherian
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • Anoop Cherian, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision group, gave an invited virtual talk on "InSeGAN: An Unsupervised Approach to Identical Instance Segmentation" at the Visual Information Laboratory of University of Bristol, UK. The talk described a new approach to segmenting varied appearances of nearly identical 3D objects in depth images. More details of the talk can be found in the following paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13865, which will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'21).
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  •  NEWS    Mouhacine Benosman has been invited to speak at the data-centric engineering summit held at the Alan Turing Institute
    Date: September 22, 2021
    Where: The Alan Turing Institute
    MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
    Research Area: Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • Mouhacine Benosman will give a talk about merging physical models with data-driven and machine learning methods for real-world application. The talk will include results about data-driven auto-tuning for feedback controllers with application to power amplifiers, extremum seeking and Gaussian processes for reduction/estimation of fluid dynamics models with application to indoor airflow modeling, and safe reinforcement learning for safety-critical and Sim2Real applications.
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  •  NEWS    Anthony Vetro delivers keynote on robotic manipulation at inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems
    Date: August 12, 2021
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.

      Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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  •  NEWS    Keynote Speech by Dr. Petros Boufounos
    Date: August 5, 2021
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL's Distinguished Researcher Dr. Petros Boufounos is the keynote speaker for the Center for Advanced Signal and Image Sciences (CASIS) 25th Annual Workshop on Aug. 5, 2021, with talk titled, "The Computational Sensing Revolution in Array Processing."
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  •  NEWS    MERL Congratulates Recipients of 2022 IEEE Technical Field Awards in Signal Processing
    Date: July 26, 2021
    MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • IEEE has announced that the recipients of the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Hervé Bourlard (EPFL/Idiap Research Institute) and Nelson Morgan (ICSI), "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition," and the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing will be Ali Sayed (EPFL), "For contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive signal processing." More details about the contributions of Prof. Bourlard and Prof. Morgan can be found in the announcements by ICSI and EPFL, and those of Prof. Sayed in EPFL's announcement. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) has recently become the new sponsor of these two prestigious awards, and extends our warmest congratulations to all of the 2022 award recipients.

      The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing, while the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing was established in 2012 for outstanding contribution to the advancement of signal processing, other than in the areas of speech and audio processing. Both awards have recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields. MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to the signal processing field through its sponsorship of these awards.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha and Siddarth Jain co-organized a workshop on Robotic Manipulation at the RSS 2021 conference
    Date: July 13, 2021
    Where: Robotics: Science and Systems
    MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha, and Siddarth Jain together with research groups at MIT, NVIDIA, NIST, TUM, Google DeepMind, ETH Zurich, Google AI, and UMASS Lowell organized a workshop at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2021 conference. The workshop was on "Advancing Artificial Intelligence and Manipulation for Robotics: Understanding Gaps, Industry and Academic Perspectives, and Community Building". The workshop had a list of excellent speakers both from academia and industry. Recording of the talks and of the panel discussion can be found in the link below.
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