- Date & Time: Thursday, December 13, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Tomasz M. Grzegorczyk, Delpsi LLC
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - Electromagnetic (EM) remote sensing is a well-established modality for the detection, tracking, and identification of concealed targets. The degree of freedom offered by the operating frequency (and the associated propagation or induction regimes) make EM waves sufficiently versatile to interrogate both large as well as small structures, metallic as well as dielectric objects, in close proximity or further away. This wide flexibility has made EM remote sensing a modality of choice in many applications. This presentation will focus on two implementations of non-destructive and non-contact EM sensing. The first is based on a tomographic approach, whereby EM waves are used to infer material properties within the volume of accessible structures. The two examples to be discussed are breast cancer detection, i.e. locating areas of high vascularity in otherwise healthy biological tissues, and inspection of concrete structures, i.e. identifying volumetric material property variations to locate rebars and cracks. The second area we will discuss is that of subsurface target detection, with again two very different applications. The first pertains to ground penetrating radars with frequencies in the GHz aimed at the detection of buried weak dielectric scatterers, whereas the second focuses on the detection of metallic targets in the magnetic induction regime, for which much lower frequencies are used. In all these applications, the data collected by the appropriate hardwares are processed by combining fundamental EM concepts with inverse methods for parameter estimation. We will discuss both a deterministic method -- Gauss-Newton -- and a stochastic method -- Kalman filters for real time target detection.
-
- Date: December 12, 2012
Where: International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA)
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The paper "Compressive Clustering of High-Dimensional Data" by Ruta, A. and Porikli, F. was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA).
-
- Date & Time: Tuesday, December 11, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Takahiro Oku, NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract - In this talk, I will present human-friendly broadcasting research conducted in NHK and research on speech recognition for real-time closed-captioning. The goal of human-friendly broadcasting research is to make broadcasting more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, including children, elderly, and physically challenged persons. The automatic speech recognition technology that NHK has developed makes it possible to create captions for the hearing impaired in real-time automatically. For sports programs such as professional sumo wrestling, a closed-captioning system has already been implemented in which captions are created by using speech recognition on a captioning re-speaker. In 2011, NHK General Television started broadcasting of closed captions for the information program "Morning Market". After the introduction of the implemented closed-captioning system, I will talk about our recent improvement obtained by an adaptation method that creates a more effective acoustic model using error correction results. The method reflects recognition error tendencies more effectively.
-
- Date: December 10, 2012
Where: IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Scott A. Bortoff; Yebin Wang Brief - The papers "A Numerical Algorithm for Nonlinear L2-gain Optimal Control with Application to Vehicle Yaw Stability Control" by Milic, V., Di Cairano, S., Kasac, J., Bemporad, A. and Situm, Z., "The Rendezvous Dynamics under Linear Quadratic Optimal Control" by Di Cairano, S., Pascucci, C.A. and Bemporad, A. and "On the Optimal Trajectory Generation for Servomotors: A Hamiltonian Approach" by Wang, Y., Ueda , K. and Bortoff, S.A. were presented at the IEEE Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
-
- Date: December 6, 2012
Where: APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The article "Bayesian Approaches to Acoustic Modeling: A Review" by Watanabe, S. and Nakamura, A. was published in APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing.
-
- Date: December 3, 2012
Where: Asia-Pacific Signal & Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun Brief - The papers "Depth Map Up-sampling Based on Edge Layers" by Graziosi, D.B., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. and "Joint Perceptually-based Intra Prediction and Quantization for HEVC" by Jin, G., Cohen, R., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. were presented at the Asia-Pacific Signal & Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference.
-
- Date: Monday, December 3, 2012 - Thursday, December 6, 2012
Location: Hollywood, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for APSIPA 2012, the fourth annual conference organized by Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association.
-
- Date: December 2, 2012
Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
MERL Contact: Ye Wang
Research Area: Information Security
Brief - The paper "A Framework for Privacy Preserving Statistical Analysis on Distributed Databases" by Lin, B-R, Wang, Y. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
-
- Date: December 1, 2012
Where: AIP Chaos
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - The article "Topological Chaos, Braiding and Bifurcation of Almost-cyclic Sets" by Grover, P., Ross, S., Stremler, M. and Kumar, P. was published in AIP Chaos.
-
- Date: November 28, 2012
Where: Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The article "Factorial Models for Noise Robust Speech Recognition" by Hershey, J.R., Rennie, S.J. and Le Roux, J. was published in the book Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition.
-
- Date: November 20, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing Brief - The articles "Performance Analysis of Cognitive Spectrum-Sharing Single-Carrier Systems with Relay Selection" by Kim, K.J., Duong, T.Q. and Tran, X.-N. and "Performance Analysis of Cyclic Prefixed Single-Carrier Spectrum Sharing Relay Systems in Primary User Interference" by Kim, K.J., Duong, T.Q., Poor, H.V. and Shu, L. were published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
-
- Date & Time: Thursday, November 15, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Eduardo Torres-Jara, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - This talk presents an alternative approach to robotic manipulation. In this approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation behind this approach stems from the fact that manipulating an object necessarily implies coming into contact with it. As a result, directly sensing physical contact seems more important than vision to control the interaction of the object and the robot. In this work, the traditional approach of a highly precise arm guided by a vision system is replaced by one that uses a low mechanical impedance arm with dense tactile sensing and exploration capabilities.
The robots OBRERO and GoBot have been built to implement this approach. We have developed a novel tactile sensing technology and mounted our sensors on the robots' hands. These sensors are biologically inspired and present adequate features for manipulation. The success of this approach is shown by picking up objects in a poorly modeled environment. This task, simple for humans, has been a challenge for robots. The robot can deal with new, unmodeled objects. Specifically, OBRERO can gently contact, explore, lift, and place an object in a different location. It can also detect basic slippage and external forces acting on an object while it is held. These tasks can be performed successfully with very light objects, without fixtures, and on slippery surfaces. Similarly, GoBot is capable of manipulating small objects such as the stones in the game GO. Both OBRERO and GoBot perform all of their manipulations using tactile feedback.
-
- Date: November 15, 2012
Where: IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The article "Joint Voltage and Phase Unbalance Detector for Three Phase Power Systems" by Sun, M., Demirtas, S. and Sahinoglu, Z. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
-
- Date: November 11, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "A Grassmann Manifold-based Domain Adaptation Approach" by Zheng, J., Liu, M.-Y., Chellappa, R. and Phillips, P.J. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR).
-
- Date & Time: Wednesday, November 7, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Marcus Sarkis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Abstract - We discuss the following problem: Given a target function on a domain, what is the Neumann data on the boundary so that its harmonic extension into the domain is the closest function to the target function in the L2 norm? For convex polygonal domains, we show that regularization is not needed in case the space for the Neumann data is chosen properly. In the second part of the talk we discuss solvers for the associated discrete Hessian which are robust with respect to regularization parameters and mesh sizes.
-
- Date: November 5, 2012
Where: International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "SLAM Using Both Points and Planes for Hand-Held 3D Sensors" by Taguchi, Y., Jian, Y.-D., Ramalingam, S. and Feng, C. was presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
-
- Date: November 1, 2012
Where: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The article "Structured Discriminative Models For Speech Recognition" by Gales, M., Watanabe, S. and Fosler-Lussier, E. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
-
- Date: October 31, 2012
Where: European Radar Conference (EuRAD)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Accurate Models for Spiral Resonators" by Ellstein, D., Wang, B. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the European Radar Conference (EuRAD).
-
- Date: October 30, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Power System Technology (POWERCON)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The paper "Decoupled Three-Phase Load Flow Method for Unbalanced Distribution Systems" by Sun, H., Dubey, A., Nikovski, D., Ohno, T., Takano, T. and Kojima, Y. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Power System Technology (POWERCON).
-
- Date: October 29, 2012
Where: IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM)
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Robust Receiver Algorithms to Mitigate Partial-Band and Partial-Time Interference in LDPC-coded OFDM Systems" by Li, L., Annavajjala, R., Koike-Akino, T. and Orlik, P. was presented at the IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM).
-
- Date: October 29, 2012
Where: CIRP Conference on Process Machine Interactions (PMI)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "High Accuracy Computation of Geometric Properties of Cutter Workpiece Intersection using Distance Fields for NC Milling" by Erdim, H. and Sullivan, A. was presented at the CIRP Conference on Process Machine Interactions (PMI).
-
- Date: October 29, 2012
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Area: Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Power Delivery Optimization for a Mobile Power Transfer System based on Resonator Arrays" by Yerazunis, W., Wang, B. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP).
-
- Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:55 AM
Speaker: Dr. Tara Sainath, IBM Research
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
-
- Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:10 AM
Speaker: Prof. Jim Glass and Chia-ying Lee, MIT CSAIL
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
-
- Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Location: MERL
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - SANE 2012, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the northeast of the American continent, will be held on Wednesday October 24, 2012 at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, MA.
-