- 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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- Date: June 23, 2013
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Single Image Calibration of Multi-Axial Imaging Systems" by Agrawal, A. and Ramalingam, S., "Joint Geodesic Upsampling of Depth Images" by Liu, M-Y, Tuzel, O. and Taguchi, Y. and "Manhattan Junction Catalogue for Spatial Reasoning of Indoor Scenes" by Ramalingam, S., Pillai, J.K., Jain, A. and Taguchi, Y. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: June 20, 2013
Where: International Conference and Exhibition on Design and Production of Machines/Dies/Molds Brief - The paper "Tool Deflection in Five-Axis Milling" by Layegh, S., Lazoglu, I. and Erdim, H. was presented at the International Conference and Exhibition on Design and Production of Machines/Dies/Molds.
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- Date: June 17, 2013
Where: American Control Conference (ACC)
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Stefano Di Cairano; Yebin Wang; Arvind Raghunathan Brief - The papers "Sub-optimal Control Design of a Semi-active Vibration Reduction System" by Wang, Y. and Utsunomiya, K., "Adaptive Estimation of State of Charge for Lithium-ion Batteries" by Fang, H., Wang, Y., Sahinoglu, Z., Wanda, T. and Hara, S., "Vehicle Yaw Dynamics Control by Torque-based Assist Systems Enforcing Driver's Steering Feel Constraints" by Zafeiropoulos, S. and Di Cairano, S., "Speed Profile Optimization for Optimal Path Tracking" by Zhao, Y. and Tsiotras, P., "Real-Time Energy-Optimal Trajeactory Generatin for a Servo Motor" by Zhao, Y., Wang, Y., Bortoff, S.A. and Ueda, K., "Global Optimization of Multi-period Optimal Power Flow" by Gopalakrishnan, A., Raghunathan, A.U., Nikovski, D., Biegler, L.T. and "Semismooth Equation Approach to Network Utility Maximization (NUM)" by Bai, L. and Raghunathan, A.U. were presented at the American Control Conference (ACC).
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- Date: June 16, 2013
Where: REHVA World Congress (CLIMA)
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Control
Brief - The paper "A Method for Computing Optimal Set-Point Schedule for HVAC Systems" by Nikovski, D., Xu, J. and Nonaka, M. was presented at the REHVA World Congress (CLIMA).
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- Date: June 14, 2013
Where: IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano Brief - The article "Vehicle Yaw Stability Control by Coordinated Active Front Steering and Differential Braking in the Tire Sideslip Angles Domain" by Di Cairano, S., Tseng, H.E., Bernardini, D. and Bemporad, A. was published in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
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- Date: June 13, 2013
Where: CIRP Conference on Modeling of Machining Operations (CIRP CMMO)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Cutter Workpiece Engagement Calculations for Five-axis Milling using Composite Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields" by Erdim, H. and Sullivan, A. was presented at the CIRP Conference on Modeling of Machining Operations (CIRP CMMO).
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- Date: June 12, 2013
Where: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The article "Hierarchical and High-Girth QC LDPC Codes" by Wang, Y., Draper, S.C. and Yedidia, J.S. was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
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- Date: June 10, 2013
Where: International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS)
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - The paper "Operational Planning of Thermal Generators with Factored Markov Decision Process Models" by Nikovski, D. was presented at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS).
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- Date: June 9, 2013
Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik Brief - The papers "Cognitive Multihop Networks in Spectrum Sharing Environment with Multiple Licensed Users" by Kim, K.J., Duong, T.Q., Tsiftsis, T.A. and Bao, V.N.Q., "Opportunistic Relaying for Cognitive Network with Multiple Primary Users over Nakagami-m Fading" by Duong, T.Q., Kim, K.J., Zepernick, H-J and Tellambura, C. and "On Probabilistic Data Association for Achieving Near-Exponential Diversity over Fading Channels" by Yellepeddi, A., Kim, K.J., Duan, C. and Orlik, P. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
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- Date: June 2, 2013
Where: IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS)
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The paper "A 40-dBm High Voltage Broadband GaN Class-J Power Amplifier for PoE Micro-Basestations" by Ma, R., Goswami, S., Yamanaka, K., Komatsuzaki, Y. and Ohta, A. was presented at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS).
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- Date: June 1, 2013
Awarded to: Yuuki Tachioka, Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey
Awarded for: "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark"
Awarded by: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The results of the 2nd 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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- Date: June 1, 2013
Where: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME).
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- Date & Time: Saturday, June 1, 2013; 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Location: Vancouver, Canada
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researchers Shinji Watanabe and Jonathan Le Roux are members of the organizing committee of CHiME 2013, the 2nd International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments, Jonathan acting as Program Co-Chair. MERL is also a sponsor for the event.
CHiME 2013 is a one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with ICASSP 2013 that will consider the challenge of developing machine listening applications for operation in multisource environments, i.e. real-world conditions with acoustic clutter, where the number and nature of the sound sources is unknown and changing over time. CHiME brings together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (computational hearing, blind source separation, speech recognition, machine learning) to discuss novel and established approaches to this problem. The cross-fertilisation of ideas will foster fresh approaches that efficiently combine the complementary strengths of each research field.
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- Date: June 1, 2013
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The results of the 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 30, 2013; 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Location: Vancouver, Canada
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the first ICASSP Student Career Luncheon that will take place at ICASSP 2013. MERL members will take part in the event to introduce MERL and talk with students interested in positions or internships.
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- Date: May 26, 2013
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jianlin Guo; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux Brief - The papers "Stereo-based Feature Enhancement Using Dictionary Learning" by Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Effectiveness of Discriminative Training and Feature Transformation for Reverberated and Noisy Speech" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Non-negative Dynamical System with Application to Speech and Audio" by Fevotte, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "Source Localization in Reverberant Environments using Sparse Optimization" by Le Roux, J., Boufounos, P.T., Kang, K. and Hershey, J.R., "A Keypoint Descriptor for Alignment-Free Fingerprint Matching" by Garg, R. and Rane, S., "Transient Disturbance Detection for Power Systems with a General Likelihood Ratio Test" by Song, JX., Sahinoglu, Z. and Guo, J., "Disparity Estimation of Misaligned Images in a Scanline Optimization Framework" by Rzeszutek, R., Tian, D. and Vetro, A., "Screen Content Coding for HEVC Using Edge Modes" by Hu, S., Cohen, R.A., Vetro, A. and Kuo, C.C.J. and "Random Steerable Arrays for Synthetic Aperture Imaging" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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- Date: May 26, 2013
Where: International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs (ISPSD)
MERL Contact: Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The paper "Design of Enhancement Mode Single-gate and Double-gate Multi-channel GaN HEMT with Vertical Polarity Inversion Heterostructure" by Feng, P., Teo, K.H., Oishi, T., Yamanaka, K. and Ma, R. was presented at the International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs (ISPSD).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Raquel Urtasun, TTI-Chicago
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract 
The development of autonomous systems that can effectively assist people with everyday tasks is one of the grand challenges in modern computer science. Notable examples are personal robotics for the elderly and people with disabilities, as well as autonomous driving systems which can help decrease fatalities caused by traffic accidents. To achieve full autonomy, multiple perception tasks must be solved: Autonomous systems should sense the environment, recognize the 3D world and interact with it. While most approaches have tackled individual perceptual components in isolation, I believe that the next generation of perceptual systems should reason jointly about multiple tasks.
In this talk I'll argue that there are four key aspects towards developing such holistic models: (i) learning, (ii) inference (iii) representation, and (iv) data. I'll describe efficient Markov random field learning and inference algorithms that exploit both the structure of the problem as well as parallel computation to achieve computational and memory efficiency. I'll demonstrate the effectiveness of our models on a wide variety of examples, and show representations and inference strategies that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance and result in several orders of magnitude speed-ups in a variety of challenging tasks, including 3D reconstruction, 3D layout parsing, object detection, semantic segmentation and free text exploitation for holistic visual recognition.
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- Date: Sunday, May 19, 2013 - Thursday, May 23, 2013
Location: Beijing, China
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the Demo Co-chair of ISCAS 2013, the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits & Systems, to be held in Beijing, China, in May 2013.
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- Date: May 19, 2013
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "View Synthesis Prediction Using Skip and Merge Candidates for HEVC-based 3D Video Coding" by Zou, F., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).
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