- Date: April 29, 2020
Where: N/A
Research Areas: Communications, Optimization, Signal Processing, Information Security
Brief - Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Signal Processing Group, will serve as lead guest editor for the upcoming JSTSP issue on, "Advanced Signal Processing for Local and Private 5G Networks." The issue is also being organized with the help of other researchers and investigators from leading organizations such as Memorial University, Nokia Bell Laboratories, Princeton University, Aalborg University, Jinan University, and South China University of Technology. This special issue aims to capture the latest research activities in local and private 5G networks from the signal processing perspective and is targeted for publication January 2022.
-
- Date: December 8, 2020 - December 11, 2020
Where: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Control, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty, a Research Scientist in MERL's Multi-Physical Systems, will be serving as an Associate Editor at the 2020 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
-
- Date: March 8, 2020 - March 13, 2020
MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - Due to COVID-19, MERL Optical Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers including 2 invited talks at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2020, that was held in San Diego from March 8-13, 2020. Topics presented include recent advances in quantum signal processing, channel coding design, nano-optic power splitter, and deep learning-based integrated photonics. In addition, Dr. Kojima gave an invited workshop talk on deep learning-based nano-photonic device optimization.
OFC is the largest global conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals. The program is comprehensive from research to marketplace, from components to systems and networks and from technical sessions to the exhibition. For over 40 years, OFC has drawn attendees from all corners of the globe to meet and greet, teach and learn, make connections and move the industry forward. The five-day technical conference features peer reviewed presentations and more than 180 invited speakers, the thought leaders in the industry presenting the highlights of emerging technologies. Additional technical programming throughout the week includes special symposia, special sessions, in-depth tutorials, workshops, panels and the thought-provoking rump session.
-
- Date: February 14, 2020
Where: 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, will be serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020).
-
- Date: February 10, 2020
MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
Brief - Dr. Benosman has been nominated as an associate editor at the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS).
The L-CSS publishes peer-reviewed brief articles that provide a rapid and concise account of innovative ideas regarding the theory, design, and applications of all aspects of control engineering.
-
- Date: January 1, 2020
Where: IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Dr. Keisuke Kojima, Senior Principal Research Staff of MERL and Fellow of The Optical Society of America (OSA), has been appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology.
IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology is a semi-monthly hybrid open-access journal, co-sponsored by seven IEEE technical societies and OSA, has been publishing leading work in optical waveguide technologies and their applications, from integrated photonics to optical networks.
-
- Date: May 26, 2020
Where: 2020 SIAM Conference on Optimization, Hong Kong
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, Data Analytics, has been invited to serve on the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Early Career Prize (SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize) committee. Instituted in 2018, the SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize is awarded every three years to an outstanding early career researcher in the field of optimization for distinguished contributions to the field in the six calendar years prior to the award year. The 2020 SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize will be awarded during the 2020 SIAM Conference on Optimization to be held in Hong Kong.
Arvind Raghunathan will also host a mini-symposium on global optimization titled "Global Optimization of MINLP: Recent Advances". The mini-symposium will feature talks related to theoretical and algorithmic aspects of global optimization.
-
- Date: December 18, 2019
Awarded to: Xuankai Chang, Wangyou Zhang, Yanmin Qian, Jonathan Le Roux, Shinji Watanabe
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researcher Jonathan Le Roux and co-authors Xuankai Chang, Shinji Watanabe (Johns Hopkins University), Wangyou Zhang, and Yanmin Qian (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2019), for the paper "MIMO-Speech: End-to-End Multi-Channel Multi-Speaker Speech Recognition". MIMO-Speech is a fully neural end-to-end framework that can transcribe the text of multiple speakers speaking simultaneously from multi-channel input. The system is comprised of a monaural masking network, a multi-source neural beamformer, and a multi-output speech recognition model, which are jointly optimized only via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) criterion. The award was received by lead author Xuankai Chang during the conference, which was held in Sentosa, Singapore from December 14-18, 2019.
-
- Date: December 12, 2019
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
Brief - Stefano Di Cairano has been appointed inaugural chair of the IEEE CSS Technology Conference Editorial Board. In this role Stefano will coordinate the creation and maintenance of the Editorial Board, and will coordinate the editorial board activities supporting the IEEE CCTA conference series, including manuscript assignment to associate editors, monitoring of the manuscript assessment, and program finalization with the conference program chairs. Stefano will also work with the other IEEE CSS Editorial Board Chairs and IEEE CSS Leadership to ensure the quality and improve the processes of IEEE CSS publications.
-
- Date: December 13, 2019
Where: IEEE Brief - Dr. Rui Ma has been appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology (IEEE J-ERM).
IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology, sponsored by IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), Antennas and Propagation Society (APS), Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and Sensor Councils (with 26 IEEE member societies), encourages the submission of manuscripts with scopes in state-of-the-art research related to electromagnetics theory, RF and Microwave techniques and integration for medical and biological applications.
-
- Date: December 11, 2019 - December 13, 2019
Where: Nice, France
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Karl Berntorp; Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the Conference on Decision and Control, MERL presented 8 papers on subjects including estimation for thermal-fluid models and transportation networks, analysis of HVAC systems, extremum seeking for multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning for vehicle platoons, and learning with applications to autonomous vehicles.
-
- Date: December 9, 2019 - December 13, 2019
Where: Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Pu (Perry) Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Information Security
Brief - MERL Signal Processing scientists and collaborators will be presenting 11 papers at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2019, which is being held in Waikoloa, Hawaii from December 9-13, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in power amplifier, MIMO algorithms, WiFi sensing, video casting, visible light communications, user authentication, vehicular communications, secrecy, and relay systems, including sophisticated machine learning applications. A number of these papers are a result of successful collaboration between MERL and world-leading Universities including: Osaka University, University of New South Wales, Oxford University, Princeton University, South China University of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aalborg University.
GLOBECOM is one of the IEEE Communications Society’s two flagship conferences dedicated to driving innovation in nearly every aspect of communications. Each year, more than 3000 scientific researchers and their management submit proposals for program sessions to be held at the annual conference. Themed “Revolutionizing Communications,” GLOBECOM2019 will feature a comprehensive high-quality technical program including 13 symposia and a variety of tutorials and workshops to share visions and ideas, obtain updates on latest technologies and expand professional and social networking.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-