- Date & Time: Friday, March 16, 2012; 10:00 AM
Speaker: Prof. Francesco Borrelli, UC Berkeley
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract - Forecasts will play an increasingly important role in the next generation of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In nominal conditions, predictions of system dynamics, human behavior and environmental envelope can be used by the control algorithm to improve safety and performance of the resulting system. However, in practice, constraint satisfaction, performance guarantees and real-time computation are challenged by the (1) growing complexity of the engineered system, (2) uncertainty in the human/machine interaction and (3) uncertainty in the environment where the system operates.
In this talk I will present the theory and tools that we have developed over the past ten years for the systematic design of predictive controllers for uncertain linear and nonlinear systems. I will first provide an overview of our theoretical efforts. Then, I will focus on our recent results in addressing constraint satisfaction and real-time computation in nonlinear systems and large-scale networked systems. Throughout the talk I will use two applications to motivate our research and show the benefits of the proposed techniques: Safe Autonomous Cars and Green Intelligent Buildings.
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- Date: March 13, 2012
Where: Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Speech Enhancement by Indirect VTS" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, March 8, 2012; 9:30 AM
Speaker: Prof. Masayuki Inaba, Professor, Director of JSK Robotics Lab<br />
Department of Creative Informatics<br />
Department of Mechano-Informatics<br />
Graduate School of Information Technology and Science<br />
The University of Tokyo Abstract - This talk introduces a history and ongoing activities of the research and development in JSK Robotics Lab, The University of Tokyo including hand-eye coordination in rope handling, correlation-based tracking vision, vision-based robotics, wireless remote-brained approach, whole-body behaviors on humanoids, tactile deformable devices for robot sensor suit, musculoskeletal spined humanoids, power systems for human speed and torque perfomance, learning and assistive activities on HRP2 (Japanese Humanoid Robot Project Platform) and PR2 (Willow Garages's Personal Robot Platform for Open Source Robot Operating System:ROS), common software architecture in all JSK robots, and their mother environment for inherited research and development in JSK.
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- Date: March 8, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The article "Persymmetric Parametric Adaptive Matched Filter for Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H. was published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
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- Date: March 5, 2012
Where: IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Metamaterials for Wireless Power Transfer" by Wang, B. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT).
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- Date: March 4, 2012
Where: Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC)
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons Brief - The papers "Fractionally-Spaced Statistical Equalizer for Fiber Nonlinearity Mitigation in Digital Coherent Optical Systems" by Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., Kojima, K., Duan, C., Yoshida, T., Sugihara, T. and Mizuochi, T. and "A Low-Complexity Sliding-Window Turbo Equalizer for Nonlinearity Compensation" by Duan, C., Parsons, K., Koike-Akino, T., Annavajjala, R., Kojima, K., Yoshida, T., Sugihara, T. and Mizouchi, T. were presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC).
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- Date: March 1, 2012
Where: Journal of Electronic Science and Technology (JEST)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The article "A Hybrid Decoupled Power Flow Method for Balanced Power Distribution Systems" by Sun, H., Nikovski, D., Ohno, T., Takano, T. and Kojima, Y. was published in Journal of Electronic Science and Technology (JEST).
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- Date: February 27, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - The article "Universal Rate-Efficient Scalar Quantization" by Boufounos, P.T. was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, February 22, 2012; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Dr. Charles Cadieu, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract - The human visual system processes complex patterns of light into a rich visual representation where the objects and motions of our world are made explicit. This remarkable feat is performed through a hierarchically arranged series of cortical areas. Little is known about the details of the representations in the intermediate visual areas. Therefore, we ask the question: can we predict the detailed structure of the representations we might find in intermediate visual areas?
In pursuit of this question, I will present a model of intermediate-level visual representation that is based on learning invariances from movies of the natural environment and produces predictions about intermediate visual areas. The model is composed of two stages of processing: an early feature representation layer, and a second layer in which invariances are explicitly represented. Invariances are learned as the result of factoring apart the temporally stable and dynamic components embedded in the early feature representation. The structure contained in these components is made explicit in the activities of second-layer units that capture invariances in both form and motion. When trained on natural movies, the first-layer produces a factorization, or separation, of image content into a temporally persistent part representing local edge structure and a dynamic part representing local motion structure. The second-layer units are split into two populations according to the factorization in the first-layer. The form-selective units receive their input from the temporally persistent part (local edge structure) and after training result in a diverse set of higher-order shape features consisting of extended contours, multi-scale edges, textures, and texture boundaries. The motion-selective units receive their input from the dynamic part (local motion structure) and after training result in a representation of image translation over different spatial scales and directions, in addition to more complex deformations. These representations provide a rich description of dynamic natural images, provide testable hypotheses regarding intermediate-level representation in visual cortex, and may be useful representations for artificial visual systems.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, February 21, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dimitri Androutsos, Richard Rzeszutek, Ryerson University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - The problem of converting monoscopic footage into stereoscopic or multi-view content is inherently difficult and ill-posed. On the surface, this does not appear to be the case as the problem may be summed up as, "Given single-view image or video, create one or more views as if they were taken from a different camera view." However, capturing a three-dimensional scene as a two-dimensional image is a lossy process and any information regarding the distance of objects to the camera is lost. Methods exist for extracting depth information from a monoscopic view and it is possible to obtain metrically-correct depth estimates under certain conditions. But since conversion is primarily used as a post-processing stage in film production, the user requires a degree of control over the results. This, in turn, makes it ill-posed as there is no way to know ahead of time what the user wants from the conversion. In this talk we will present the work being done at Ryerson University on user-guided 2D-to-3D conversion. In particular, we will focus on how existing image segmentation techniques may be combined to produce reasonable depth maps for conversion while still providing complete control to the user. We will also discuss how our research can be applied to both images and video without any significant alterations to our methods.
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- Date: Monday, February 6, 2012 - Friday, February 10, 2012
Location: San Jose, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 99th MPEG meeting to be held in San Jose, CA, in February 2012. MERL researcher Anthony Vetro serves as Head of the US Delegation to MPEG.
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- Date: January 29, 2012
Where: AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - The paper "Optimized Three-Body Gravity Assists and Manifold Transfers in End-to-End Lunar Mission Design" by Grover, P. and Andersson, C. was presented at the AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting.
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- Date: January 26, 2012
Where: IEICE Optical Communication Systems (OCS)
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "Fractionally-Spaced Equalizer Based on High-Order Statistics in Nonlinear Fiber Optics" by Koike-Akino, T., Duan, C., Parsons, K., Kojima, K., Yoshida, T., Sugihara, T. and Mizuochi, T. was presented at IEICE Optical Communication Systems (OCS).
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- Date: January 10, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The article "Scalable Active Learning for Multi-Class Image Classification" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F. and Papanikolopoulos, N. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, January 4, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Ye Wang, AgaMatrix, Inc. Abstract - In the field of Secure Multi-party Computation, the general objective is to design protocols that allow a group of parties to securely compute functions of their collective private data, while maintaining privacy (in that no parties reveal any more information about their personal data than necessary) and ensuring correctness (in that no parties can disrupt or influence the computation beyond the affect of changing their input data). Information theoretic approaches toward this broad problem, that provide provable (unconditional) security guarantees (even against adversaries that have unbounded computational power), have established that general computation is possible in a variety of scenarios. However, these general solutions are not always the most efficient or finely tuned to the requirements of specific problems and applications.
In this talk, we will overview our work toward the development of efficient information theoretic approaches for secure multi-party computation applications within the common theme of secure computation and inference over a distributed data network. These applications include:
1) private information retrieval, where the objective is to privately obtain data without revealing what was selected;
2) secure statistical analysis, the problem of extracting statistics without revealing anything else about the underlying distributed data;
3) secure sampling, which is the secure distributed generation of new data with a given joint distribution; and
4) secure authentication, where the identity of a party needs to authenticated via inference on his credentials and stored registration data.
Our contributions toward these applications include the following. We proposed a novel oblivious transfer protocol, applicable to private information retrieval, that trades off a small amount privacy for a drastic increase in efficiency. We leveraged a dimensionality reduction that exploits functional structure to simultaneously achieve arbitrarily high accuracy and efficiency in protocols that perform secure statistical analysis of distributed databases. Toward characterizing the region of distributions that can be securely sampled from scratch, we fully characterized the two-party scenario and provided inner and outer bounds on the multi-party scenario. Toward enabling secure distributed authentication, we proposed a two-factor secure biometric authentication system that is robust against the compromise of registered biometric data, allowing for revocability and providing resistance against cross-enrollment attacks.
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- Date: January 1, 2012
Where: Video Analytics for Business Intelligence
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The article "Object Detection & Tracking" by Porikli, F. and Yilmaz, A. was published in the book Video Analytics for Business Intelligence.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, December 20, 2011; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Olivia Leitermann, MIT
MERL Host: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Abstract - Ancillary services such as frequency regulation are required for reliable operation of the electric grid. Currently, the same traditional thermal generators that supply bulk power also perform nearly all frequency regulation. Instead, using high power energy storage resources to provide frequency regulation can allow traditional thermal generators to operate more smoothly. However, using energy storage alone for frequency regulation would require an unreasonably large energy storage capacity. Duration curves for energy capacity and instantaneous ramp rate are used to evaluate the requirements and benefits of using energy storage for a component of frequency regulation. High-pass filtering and closed-loop control are used to separate the portion of a frequency regulation control signal suitable for provision by an energy storage unit from the portion suitable for provision by traditional thermal generating resources. Not all frequency regulation signals are equally amenable to the filtering approach used here. Data from two U.S. control areas are used to demonstrate the techniques and the results are compared.
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- Date: December 12, 2011
Where: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC)
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - The paper "Construction of Embedded Markov Decision Processes for Optimal Control of Non-Linear Systems with Continuous State Spaces" by Nikovski, D. and Esenther, A. was presented at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC).
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- Date: December 7, 2011
Where: International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS)
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The paper "Design and Simulation of Enhancement-mode N-polar GaN Single-channel and Dual-channel MIS-HEMTs" by Feng, P., Teo, K.H., Oishi, T., Nakayama, M., Duan, C. and Zhang, J. was presented at the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS).
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- Date: December 5, 2011
Where: IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM)
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Secrecy Rate Analysis of Jamming Superposition in Presence of Many Eavesdropping Users" by Koike-Akino, T. and Duan, C. was presented at the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 1, 2011; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Gregg Favalora, Optics for Hire (OFH)
MERL Host: Matthew Brand Abstract - I'll give an information-rich survey presentation on "interesting and unusual" forms of autostereo display. It will assume basic knowledge of autostereo, e.g. lenticular and parallax barrier displays [unless, of course, you'd like a few minutes going over the basics.] I will discuss: spatially-multiplexed, time-multiplexed, and multi-projector systems. This includes: non-obvious depth cues, advances in parallax barrier displays, lenticulars, multi-projector / projection onto corrugated screens, scanned illumination, volumetric, and electro-holographic techniques.
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- Date: November 30, 2011
Where: International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI) Brief - The paper "Evaluating the Usability of a Head-Up Display for Selection from Choice Lists in Cars" by Weinberg, G., Harsham, B. and Medenica, Z. was presented at the International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI).
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- Date: November 29, 2011
Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Information Security
Brief - The paper "Secure Binary Embeddings for Privacy Preserving Nearest Neighbors" by Boufounos, P. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
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- Date: November 23, 2011
Where: IEEE Transactions on Communications
MERL Contact: Jinyun Zhang
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The article "Unified Spectral Efficiency Analysis of Cellular Systems with Channel-Aware Schedulers" by Wu, J., Mehta, N.B., Molisch, A.F. and Zhang, J. was published in IEEE Transactions on Communications.
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- Date & Time: Friday, November 18, 2011; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Shreeshankar Bodas, MIT Abstract - We look at the problem of designing "efficient" resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks. The volume of data transferred over the wireless network has been ever-growing, but the resources (time, frequency) are not growing at the same rate. We therefore need to design good resource allocation schemes to guarantee a good quality of service to the users.
In the first part of the talk, we look at the wireless access network, such as Wi-Fi. We have three objectives: ensure high resource utilization, low user-perceived latency, while keeping the computational burden on the devices to a minimum. An interesting recent result by Shah et al says that these three objectives are incompatible with other, unless P=NP. We design a physical layer-aware medium access algorithm that simultaneously achieves the three objectives, and thereby show that the hardness result by Shah et al is an artifact of a simplistic view of the physical layer.
The second part of the talk focuses on designing scheduling algorithms for wireless downlink networks, such as a cellular network. Our objectives (again) are high resource utilization, low per-user delay, and a "simple" algorithm. We outline the drawbacks of the classic MaxWeight-type algorithms, and design iterative resource allocation schemes that perform well on all the three fronts.
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