- Date: February 10, 2014
MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation demonstrated an ultra-simple HMI for in-car device operation using algorithms developed by MERL to predict user actions and destinations.
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- Date: Monday, January 13, 2014 - Friday, January 17, 2014
Location: San Jose, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 107th MPEG meeting to be held in San Jose, CA, in January 2014. MERL researcher Anthony Vetro serves as Head of the US Delegation to MPEG.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, November 6, 2013; 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MIT, Kiva room @CSAIL
MERL Contact: Matthew Brand Brief - Every year, MIT neighbor Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs hires 40-60 talented and motivated graduate students for summer internships in CS/EE-oriented research projects, aimed at real-world impact and high-quality publications. Join us for our kick-off recruiting reception at the Kiva/Patel room Wednesday 1-3pm. There will be a short overview of current research areas, confections, and MERL researchers on hand to discuss research opportunities. .
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- Date & Time: Thursday, October 24, 2013; 8:45 AM - 5:00 PM
Location: Columbia University
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - SANE 2013, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 24, 2013 at Columbia University, in New York City.
A follow-up to SANE 2012 held in October 2012 at MERL in Cambridge, MA, this year's SANE will be held in conjunction with the WASPAA workshop, held October 20-23 in upstate New York. WASPAA attendees are welcome and encouraged to attend SANE.
SANE 2013 will feature invited speakers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community. It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers.
SANE 2013 is organized by Prof. Dan Ellis (Columbia University), Jonathan Le Roux (MERL) and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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- Date & Time: Friday, October 18, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Shreyas Sundaram, University of Waterloo
MERL Host: Mouhacine Benosman Abstract 
This talk will describe a method to stabilize a plant with a network of resource-constrained wireless nodes. As opposed to traditional networked control schemes where the nodes simply route information to and from a dedicated controller, our approach treats the network itself as the controller. Specifically, we formulate a strategy where each node repeatedly updates its state to be a linear combination of the states of neighboring nodes. We show that this causes the entire network to behave as a linear dynamical system, with sparsity constraints imposed by the network topology. We provide a numerical design procedure to determine the appropriate linear combinations for each node so that the transmissions of the nodes closest to the actuators are stabilizing. We also make connections to decentralized control theory and the concept of fixed modes to provide topological conditions under which stabilization is possible. We show that this "Wireless Control Network" requires low computational and communication overhead, simplifies transmission scheduling, and enables compositional design. We also consider the issue of security in this control scheme. Using structured system theory, we show that a certain number of malicious or misbehaving nodes can be detected and identified provided that the connectivity of the network is sufficiently high.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, October 17, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Laurent Daudet, Paris Diderot University, France
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract 
In acoustics, one may wish to acquire a wavefield over a whole spatial domain, while we can only make point measurements (ie, with microphones). Even with few sources, this remains a difficult problem because of reverberation, which can be hard to characterize. This can be seen as a sampling / interpolation problem, and it raises a number of interesting questions: how many sample points are needed, where to choose the sampling points, etc. In this presentation, we will review some case studies, in 2D (vibrating plates) and 3D (room acoustics), with numerical and experimental data, where we have developed sparse models, possibly with additional 'structures', based on a physical modeling of the acoustic field. These type of models are well suited to reconstruction techniques known as compressed sensing. These principles can also be used for sub-nyquist optical imaging : we will show preliminary experimental results of a new compressive imager, remarkably simple in its principle, using a multiply scattering medium.
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- Date & Time: Friday, October 4, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Goksel Dedeoglu, Texas Instruments
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract 
There are growing needs to accelerate computer vision algorithms on embedded processors for wide-ranging equipment including mobile phones, network cameras, robots, and automotive safety systems. In our Vision R&D group, we conduct various projects to understand how the vision requirements can be best addressed on Digital Signal Processors (DSP), where the compute bottlenecks are, and how we should evolve our hardware & software architectures to meet our customers' future needs. Towards this end, we build prototypes wherein we design and optimize embedded software for real-world application performance and robustness. In this talk, I will provide examples of vision problems that we have recently tackled.
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- Date: September 26, 2013
Awarded to: Jonathan Le Roux
Awarded for: "A new non-negative dynamical system for speech and audio modeling"
Awarded by: Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
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- Date & Time: Friday, September 6, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Davide M. Raimondo, University of Pavia, Italy
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract 
Although there are many fault diagnosis algorithms available, there has been very little work on the design or modification of control inputs with the aim of increasing the detectability and isolability of faults. The use of such inputs has clear potential for overcoming a central difficulty in fault detection, which is to distinguish the effects of faults from those of disturbances, process uncertainties, etc. Accordingly, the use of active inputs could be a transformative technology in industry, provided that such inputs can be computed reliably and efficiently.
This presentation discusses new methods for computing active inputs that guarantee that the input-output data of a process will be sufficient to correctly identify a fault from a given library of possible faults. This problem is inherently nonconvex and has a combinatorial dependence on the number of faults considered. To address this, a new formulation is considered, along with related approximations, that is amenable to efficient solution using standard optimization packages (e.g. CPLEX). The theoretical contributions combine ideas from reachability analysis, set-based computations, and optimization theory to exploit detailed problem structure and thereby manage the problem complexity. Comparisons with an existing method show that the proposed formulation provides a dramatic reduction in the required computational effort.
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- Date & Time: Friday, August 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr Cornel Sultan, Virginia Tech Abstract 
Coordinate coupling raises serious numerical, analysis, and control design problems that grow with the size of the system. On the other hand, decoupled dynamic equations facilitate all of the above processes since each equation can be treated independently. Unfortunately, due to the inherent heterogeneity typical of most practical, complex systems, these are not naturally decoupled so developing accurate enough decoupled approximations is of interest.
In this talk the issue of building such accurate decoupled approximations is addressed by leveraging concepts from robust control theory. Specifically, system gains (e.g. energy gain, peak to peak gain) are used to characterize the approximation error. Then some system parameters are selected to minimize this approximation error. The advantage of using system gains is that the decoupling approximation is guaranteed to be accurate over an entire class of signals (e.g. finite energy/finite peak signals). These ideas are illustrated on linearized models of tensegrity structures which are designed to yield accurate decoupled models with respect to all signals of finite energy and finite peak. Further analysis corrects several misconceptions regarding decoupling, system properties, and control design.
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- Date: August 19, 2013
Where: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
MERL Contact: Ye Wang
Research Area: Information Security
Brief - The article "Secure Biometrics: Concepts, Authentication Architectures & Challenges" by Rane, S., Wang, Y., Draper, S.C. and Ishwar, P. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
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- Date: Thursday, August 1, 2013
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is Guest Editor for the Special Issue on 3D Representation, Compression & Rendering of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, July 30, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Ramon Granell, Oxford University
MERL Host: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Abstract 
We show that real electricity-use patterns can be distinguished using a Bayesian nonparametric model based on the Dirichlet Process Mixture Model. By modelling the load profiles as discrete counters we make use of the Dirichlet-Multinomial distribution. Clusters are computed with the Chinese Restaurant Process method and posterior probabilities distributions estimated with a Gibbs sampling algorithm.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, July 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Sandipan Mishra, Renssealer Polytechnic Institute
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract 
This talk will present the breadth of research activities in the Intelligent Systems, Automation & Control Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ranging from building systems control to additive manufacturing and adaptive optics. In particular, we will focus on the modeling and control design paradigms for intelligent building systems and smart LED lighting systems. Since building systems have substantial variability of occupancy, usage, ambient environment, and physical properties over time, strategies for "model-free" control algorithms for building temperature control will be illustrated. The seminar will also discuss the state-of-the-art in feedback control of lighting systems and demonstrate the efficacy of distributed control and consensus type algorithms for these large-scale lighting systems. Finally, some interesting examples of bio-inspired estimation from blurry images for adaptive optics will be presented.
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- Date: July 21, 2013
Where: IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting
Research Areas: Electric Systems, Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "Fast Frequency and Phase Estimation in Three Phase Power Systems" by Chen, Z., Sahinoglu, Z. and Li, H. was presented at the IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting.
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- Date: July 19, 2013
Where: International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognion (MLDM)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The paper "Smart Meter Data Analysis for Power Theft Detection" by Nikovski, D., Wang, Z., Esenther, A., Sun, H., Sugiura, K., Muso, T. and Tsuru, K. was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognion (MLDM).
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, July 16, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Michael Tiller, Xogeny Abstract 
Model-based System Engineering has been recognized, for some time, as a way for companies to improve their product development processes. However, change takes time in engineering and we still have only scratched the surface of what is possible. New ideas and technologies are constantly emerging that can improve a model-based approach. In this talk, I will discuss some of my past experiences with model-based system engineering in the automotive industry. I'll also discuss the shifts I see from numerical approaches to more symbolic approaches and how this manifests itself in a shift from imperative representations of engineering models to more declarative ones. I'll cover some of the interesting challenges I've seen trying to model automotive systems and how I think those challenges can be overcome moving forward. Finally, I'll talk about some of the exciting possibilities I see on the horizon for modeling.
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- Date: July 9, 2013
Where: International Journal of Control
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Matthew Brand; Scott A. Bortoff
Research Area: Control
Brief - The article "Projection-free Parallel Quadratic Programming for Linear Model predictive Control" by Di Cairano, S., Brand, M. and Bortoff, S.A. was published in International Journal of Control.
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- Date: July 8, 2013
Where: Signal Processing with Adaptive Sparse Structural Representation (SPARS)
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The article "On Embedding the Angles Between Signals" by Boufounos, P.T. was published in Signal Processing with Adaptive Sparse Structural Representation (SPARS).
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- Date: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - Friday, July 5, 2013
Location: Klagenfurt am Worthersee, Austria
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the publicity chair for America of QoMEX 2013, the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience, to be held Klagenfurt am Worthersee, Austria, in July 2013.
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- Date: July 1, 2013
Where: International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications (SampTA)
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The paper "Sparse Signal Reconstruction from Phase-only Measurements" by Boufounos, P.T. was presented at the International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications (SampTA).
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- Date: June 30, 2013
Where: OptoElectronics and Communications Conference and International Conference on Photonics in Switching (OECC/PS)
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "A Study on the Effectiveness of Turbo Equalization with FEC for Nonlinearity Compensatin in Coherent WDM Transmissions" by Fujimori, T., Koike-Akino, T., Sugihara, T., Kubo, K., Koguchi, K., Mizuochi, T., Ohshima, C., Nakashima, H. and Hoshida, T. was presented at the OptoElectronics and Communications Conference and International Conference on Photonics in Switching (OECC/PS).
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- Date: June 29, 2013
Where: International Conference on 3DTV-Conference
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Model-Based Vehicle Pose Estimation and Tracking in Videos Using Random Forests" by Hodlmoser, M., Micusik, B., Pollegeys, M., Liu, M-Y. and Kampel, M. was presented at the International Conference on 3DTV-Conference.
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- Date & Time: Friday, June 28, 2013; 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Location: Portland, Oregon
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - Amit Agrawal is the co-organizer of the CCD/PROCAMS 2013 Workshop of Computational Cameras and Displays.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, June 26, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Gabriel Rodrigues de Campos, Chalmers University
MERL Host: Mouhacine Benosman Abstract 
In this talk, we consider a scenario where several vehicles have to coordinate among them in order to cross a traffic intersection. Thus, the control problem relies on the optimization of global cost function while guaranteeing collision avoidance and the satisfaction of local constraints. We propose a decentralized solution, where vehicles sequentially solve local optimization problems allowing them to cross, in a safe way, the intersection. Such approach pays a special attention to how quantify the degrees of freedom that each vehicle disposes to avoid a potential collision and lead to an adequate formalism in which collision avoidance is enforced through local state constraints at given time instants. Finally, simulations results on the efficiency, performance and optimality of the proposed approach are presented at the end of the talk.
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