- Date: January 6, 2016
Awarded to: Andrew Knyazev Brief - Andrew Knyazev is awarded the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver effective 1/31/2016. The award letter from the Chancellor of the University of Colorado Denver provides examples of the record of excellence over 20 years of contributions to the university such as 2008 CU Denver Excellence in Research Award, 2000 Teaching Excellence Award for the college, supervision of Ph.D. students, and two decades of uninterrupted external research funding from the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy.
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- Date: December 14, 2015 - December 16, 2015
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher, Oncel Tuzel, gave a keynote talk at 2016 International Symposium on Visual Computing in Las Vegas, Dec. 16, 2015. The talk was titled: "Machine vision for robotic bin-picking: Sensors and algorithms" and reviewed MERL's research in the application of 2D and 3D sensing and machine learning to the problem of general pose estimation.
The talk abstract was: For over four years, at MERL, we have worked on the robot "bin-picking" problem: using a 2D or 3D camera to look into a bin of parts and determine the pose, 3D rotation and translation, of a good candidate to pick up. We have solved the problem several different ways with several different sensors. I will briefly describe the sensors and the algorithms. In the first half of the talk, I will describe the Multi-Flash camera, a 2D camera with 8 flashes, and explain how this inexpensive camera design is used to extract robust geometric features, depth edges and specular edges, from the parts in a cluttered bin. I will present two pose estimation algorithms, (1) Fast directional chamfer matching--a sub-linear time line matching algorithm and (2) specular line reconstruction, for fast and robust pose estimation of parts with different surface characteristics. In the second half of the talk, I will present a voting-based pose estimation algorithm applicable to 3D sensors. We represent three-dimensional objects using a set of oriented point pair features: surface points with normals and boundary points with directions. I will describe a max-margin learning framework to identify discriminative features on the surface of the objects. The algorithm selects and ranks features according to their importance for the specified task which leads to improved accuracy and reduced computational cost.
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- Date: December 15, 2015
Awarded to: John R. Hershey, Takaaki Hori, Jonathan Le Roux and Shinji Watanabe
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The results of the third 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge were publicly announced on December 15 at the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2015) held in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. MERL's Speech and Audio Team, in collaboration with SRI, ranked 2nd out of 26 teams from Europe, Asia and the US. The task this year was to recognize speech recorded using a tablet in real environments such as cafes, buses, or busy streets. Due to the high levels of noise and the distance from the speaker's mouth to the microphones, this is very challenging task, where the baseline system only achieved 33.4% word error rate. The MERL/SRI system featured state-of-the-art techniques including multi-channel front-end, noise-robust feature extraction, and deep learning for speech enhancement, acoustic modeling, and language modeling, leading to a dramatic 73% reduction in word error rate, down to 9.1%. The core of the system has since been released as a new official challenge baseline for the community to use.
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- Date: December 1, 2015
Awarded to: Mark A. Davenport, Petros T. Boufounos, Michael B. Wakin and Richard G. Baraniuk
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - Petros Boufounos is a recipient of the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for the paper that he co-authored with Mark A. Davenport, Michael B. Wakin and Richard G. Baraniuk on "Signal Processing with Compressive Measurements" which was published in the April 2010 issue of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. The Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society's technical scope, and appearing in one of the Society's solely owned transactions or the Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. Eligibility is based on a five-year window: for example, for the 2015 Award, the paper must have appeared in one of the Society's Transactions between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2014.
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- Date: December 15, 2015
Where: 2015 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
MERL Contact: Hassan Mansour
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Andrew Knyazev gave 3 talks at the 2015 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). The papers were published in IEEE conference proceedings.
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- Date: November 11, 2015 - November 12, 2015
Where: University of Connecticut
MERL Contacts: Christopher R. Laughman; Scott A. Bortoff; Hongtao Qiao
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - MERL Researchers Scott A. Bortoff, Chris Laughman and Hongtao Qiao attended the North America Modelica User's Group Meeting, hosted by the University of Connecticut, November 11-12, 2015. Scott Bortoff gave the Keynote Address entitled "Using Modelica in Industrial Research and Development," and Chris Laughman and Hongtao Qiao each presented a paper on modelling of HVAC systems. The Meeting attracted approximately 80 Modelica users from a diverse set of companies and universities including United Technologies, Johnson Controls and Ford. Use of Modelica is accelerating in North America, lead by largely by automotive and similar "systems manufacturing" type companies.
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- Date: Friday, November 6, 2015
Location: Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating
MERL Contact: Christopher R. Laughman
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - Chris Laughman of MERL and Kevin Miskewicz of MEUS-HVAC led a webinar on Friday, November 6 with over 20 leading HVAC industry trade publications on new products that are being released, as well as the role that MERL plays in advancing the forefront of technology within Mitsubishi Electric. Titled "Inventing the Future of VRF (and Other Neat Stuff)", they discussed the innovations embodied in the new L-generation City-Multi system, as well as trends in the HVAC industry and some recently published MERL research in the HVAC area.
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- Date: November 4, 2015
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
Brief - Stefano Di Cairano has become Senior Member of IEEE. In addition, he has been asked by the Vice President for Technical Activities of the Control System Society (CSS) of IEEE to take the role of Chair of the Standing Committee on Standards. S. Di Cairano will succeed Dr. T. Samad, Honeywell, as chair of the committee. His nomination should be ratified by the IEEE-CSS Board of Governor at the meeting in Osaka, in December 2015.
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- Date: October 25, 2015
Where: Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - Teng-Yok Lee served as the poster co-chair for the Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) workshop at IEEEVis 2015 in Chicago, Oct. 25-30. At IEEEVis there were over 2000 attendees and three highly competitive main subconferences (SciVis, InfoVis, and Visual Analytics and Technology (VAST)).
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- Date & Time: Monday, November 23, 2015; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Manuchehr Aminian, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Abstract 
The classic work by G.I. Taylor describes the enhanced longitudinal diffusivity of a passive tracer subjected to laminar pipe flow. Much work since then has gone into extending this result particularly in calculating the evolution of the scalar variance. However, less work has been done to describe the evolution of asymmetry in the distribution. We present the results from a modeling effort to understand how the higher moments of the tracer distribution depend on geometry based off of explicit results in the circular pipe. We do this via analysis of "channel-limiting" geometries (rectangular ducts and elliptical pipes parameterized by their aspect ratio), using both new analytical tools and Monte Carlo simulation, which have revealed a wealth of nontrivial behavior of the distributions at short and intermediate time.
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- Date: September 30, 2015
Awarded to: Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (MELCO) advertisements based on 3D reconstruction received a Gold medal and a Bronze medal in the Fujisankei Newspaper. "Will I fit?", "He'll fit just fine.", and "Oops, did you think in 3D?".
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- Date: September 21, 2015
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Christopher R. Laughman Brief - MERL researchers Scott Bortoff, Dan Burns and Chris Laughman attended the 11th Annual Modelica Conference in Versailles, France. Modelica is a computer language for modelling and simulation of multiphysical systems. There were 421 attendees, with representatives from Toyota, automobile companies, European universities and companies like Dassault. Conference topics included a plenary on cyber-physical systems modelling by Prof. Sangiovanni Vincentelli of UC Berkeley, new libraries for modelling HVAC systems, automobile systems and buildings, and research results for new solvers. An important trend is virtual modelling and simulation of building thermodynamics (scaling up to city districts), automotive systems (autonomous vehicles), and especially Factory Automation: Dassault is investing heavily in this area, focusing on smaller customers, with tools for 3D virtual modelling of assembly lines including machine dynamics (robotics), and in partnerships with Siemens and other European FA companies.
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- Date: September 17, 2015
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Scott A. Bortoff; Abraham Goldsmith Brief - MERL researchers presented 3 papers at the 5th IFAC Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Conference. Approximately 150 attendees. Conference topics range from theory (existence, stability), to algorithms (optimization, design), to applications (process control, mechatronics, energy, automotive, aerospace). MERL was an industry sponsor for the conference. MERL researcher co-chaired the Industry Session on Industry perspective on Model Predictive Control. MERL researcher acted as Program Co-chair, organizing the conference program.
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- Date: October 6, 2015
Where: IFAC workshop on control applications of optimization 2015
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL researchers Andrew Knyazev and Alexander Malyshev gave two talks at the IFAC workshop on control applications of optimization, 2015. The papers were published by Elsevier B.V. in the conference proceedings.
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- Date: Thursday, October 22, 2015
Location: Google, New York City, NY
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - SANE 2015, 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 22, 2015 at Google, in New York City, NY.
It is a follow-up to SANE 2012, held at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), SANE 2013, held at Columbia University, and SANE 2014, held at MIT, which each gathered 70 to 90 researchers and students.
SANE 2015 will feature invited talks by leading researchers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community: Rohit Prasad (Amazon), Michael Mandel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Ron Weiss (Google), John Hershey (MERL), Pablo Sprechmann (NYU), Tuomas Virtanen (Tampere University of Technology), and Paris Smaragdis (UIUC). It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers.
SANE 2015 is organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Hank Liao (Google), Andrew Senior (Google), and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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- Date: September 18, 2015
Where: IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2015
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researchers A. Knyazev and A. Malyshev gave a talk at the IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2015. The paper was published at the IEEE Xplore conference proceedings.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2015; 12:00
Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang Brief - To celebrate "Women in Science at MERL," a luncheon event was organized on August 4. Eleven female interns, three female researchers, and female members of HQ staff, interns, hosts/managers and MERL executives participated in that event. All female interns introduced their research projects and their positive experiences at MERL; female researchers shared their own career development stories; and at the end all discussed how to be successful in the field of science. Every participant was inspired to continue contributing to the future of science.
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- Date: July 13, 2015 - July 17, 2015
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - SA group members (M. Liu, S. Lin (intern), S. Ramalingam, O. Tuzel) presented a paper at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Rome July 13-17 called 'Layered Interpretation of Street View Images'. The results they reported are now listed as the leader of the benchmark competition sponsored by Daimler. [Note that at that URL ref 2 is from collaboration with Daimler and it uses a FPGA for high speed, whereas MERL result is obtained with desktop computer and GPU.].
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- Date: July 23, 2015
Brief - Work by MERL researcher, Ulugbek Kamilov, has been reviewed in the "News & Views" section of Nature. The work, which was part of his doctoral dissertation at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, describes a framework to reconstruct the 3D refractive index of an object by solving a large-scale optimization problem that considers how light propagates through a medium. Results have been shown for 3D imaging of biological cells, but the solution to such inverse problems have the potential to be applied to a much wider set of imaging problems, such as seeing through fog, murky water or even human tissue.
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- Date: July 15, 2015
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - A new book on Bayesian Speech and Language Processing has been published by MERL researcher, Shinji Watanabe, and research collaborator, Jen-Tzung Chien, a professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
With this comprehensive guide you will learn how to apply Bayesian machine learning techniques systematically to solve various problems in speech and language processing. A range of statistical models is detailed, from hidden Markov models to Gaussian mixture models, n-gram models and latent topic models, along with applications including automatic speech recognition, speaker verification, and information retrieval. Approximate Bayesian inferences based on MAP, Evidence, Asymptotic, VB, and MCMC approximations are provided as well as full derivations of calculations, useful notations, formulas, and rules. The authors address the difficulties of straightforward applications and provide detailed examples and case studies to demonstrate how you can successfully use practical Bayesian inference methods to improve the performance of information systems. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and industry practitioners working in machine learning, signal processing, and speech and language processing.
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- Date: July 3, 2015
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Yebin Wang; Stefano Di Cairano; Arvind Raghunathan; Avishai Weiss Brief - MERL researchers presented 10 papers at the American Controls Conference, in Chicago, USA. The ACC is one of the most important conferences on control systems in the world. Topics ranged from theoretical, including new algorithms for Model Predictive Control and Co-Design, to applications including spacecraft control and HVAC systems.
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- Date: June 25, 2015
MERL Contact: William S. Yerazunis
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The CRM114 Discriminator, an open-source spam filter / text classifier created by William Yerazunis in MERL's Data Analytics group, continues to turn up in interesting places - and apparently one of them is in the US Department of Transportation's process for analysis of car safety defect reports.
Although CRM114 is usually used as a spam filter, CRM114 has been used to analyze resumes for jobseekers, scanning outgoing emails to detect accidental confidential information leaks, perusing blogs for relevance, scanning syslog files for interesting events, and now, apparently, searching complaints sent to NHTSA to find safety-related vehicle malfunctions.
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- Date: June 4, 2015
MERL Contact: Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Li Zhu, Koon Hoo Teo and Qun Gao's paper, 'Dynamic On-resistance and Tunneling Based De-trapping in GaN HEMT,' was awarded the "Best Student Poster Award" at the IEEE International Conference on Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits (EDSSC) 2015.
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- Date: June 1, 2015
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Rui Ma has been elected as Vice Chair of the IEEE Boston Section Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Chapter.
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- Date: July 13, 2015
Where: SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers presented talks at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015. The papers were published by SIAM in the conference proceedings.
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