- 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: 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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- 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 15, 2013
Where: Proceedings of IEEE
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis; Koon Hoo Teo Brief - The article "Wireless Power Transfer: Metamaterials and Array of Coupled Resonators" by Wang, B., Yerazunis, W. and Teo, K.H. was published in Proceedings of IEEE.
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- Date: May 15, 2013
Where: IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Wireless Power Transfer with Artificial Magnetic Conductors" by Wu, J., Wang, B., Yerazunis, W.S. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC).
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- Date: May 14, 2013
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Point-Plane SLAM for Hand-Held 3D Sensors" by Taguchi, Y., Jian, Y-D, Ramalingam, S. and Feng, C. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA).
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- Date: May 8, 2013
Where: Conference on Telecommunications (Conftele)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Analysis of Depth Map Resampling Filters for Depth-based 3D Video Coding" by Graziosi, D.B., Rodrigues, N.M.M., de Faria, S.M.M., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. was presented at the Conference on Telecommunications (Conftele).
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, May 8, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Vikrant Aute, University of Maryland
MERL Host: Christopher R. Laughman
Research Area: Data Analytics
Abstract 
Heat exchangers are a key component in any air-conditioning, heat pumping and refrigeration system. These heat exchangers (aka evaporators, condensers, indoor units, outdoor units) not only contribute significantly to the total cost of the system but also contain the most refrigerant charge. There is a continued interest in improving the designs of heat exchangers and making them more compact while reducing the cost. Compact heat exchangers help improve system performance, reduce power consumption and lower the first costs. Due to the lower internal volume, they hold lower refrigerant charge which in turn results in lower environmental impact.
In the simulation based design and optimization of compact heat exchangers, there are two main challenges. The first challenge arises from the use of computationally expensive analysis tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The second challenge is the effect of scales. The use of CFD tools can make the optimization infeasible due to computing and engineering resource limitations. Furthermore, during CFD analysis, certain simplifications are made to the computational domain such as simulating a small periodic segment of a given heat transfer surface. In this talk, three technologies are introduced that assist in addressing these issues. These technologies are (1) Approximation Assisted Optimization, (2) Parallel Parameterized CFD, and (3) Multi-scale modeling of heat exchangers. These technologies together help reduce the computational effort by more than 90% and engineering time by more than 50%. Two real world applications focusing on air-to-refrigerant and liquid-to-refrigerant heat exchangers will be discussed, that demonstrate the application of these technologies.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, May 7, 2013; 2:30 PM
Speaker: Dr. Yotaro Kubo, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract 
Kernel methods are important to realize both convexity in estimation and ability to represent nonlinear classification. However, in automatic speech recognition fields, kernel methods are not widely used conventionally. In this presentation, I will introduce several attempts to practically incorporate kernel methods into acoustic models for automatic speech recognition. The presentation will consist of two parts. The first part will describes maximum entropy discrimination and its application to a kernel machine training. The second part will describes dimensionality reduction of kernel-based features.
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- Date & Time: Friday, May 3, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas, Northwestern University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract 
Texture is an important visual attribute both for human perception and image analysis systems. We present new structural texture similarity metrics and applications that critically depend on such metrics, with
emphasis on image compression and content-based retrieval. The new metrics account for human visual perception and the stochastic nature of textures. They rely entirely on local image statistics and allow substantial point-by-point deviations between textures that according to human judgment are similar or essentially identical.
We also present new testing procedures for objective texture similarity metrics. We identify three operating domains for evaluating the performance of such similarity metrics: the top of the similarity scale, where a monotonic relationship between metric values and subjective scores is desired; the ability to distinguish between perceptually similar and dissimilar textures; and the ability to retrieve "identical" textures. Each domain has different performance goals and requires different testing procedures. Experimental results similarity metrics demonstrate both the performance of the proposed metrics and the effectiveness of the proposed subjective testing procedures.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 2, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Ben Miller, MIT Abstract 
Graph theory provides an intuitive mathematical foundation for dealing with relational data, but there are numerous computational challenges in the detection of interesting behavior within small subsets of vertices, especially as the graphs grow larger and the behavior becomes more subtle. This presentation discusses computational considerations of a residuals-based subgraph detection framework, including the implications on inference with recent statistical models. We also present scaling properties, demonstrating analysis of a billion-vertex graph using commodity hardware.
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- Date: May 2, 2013
Where: International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Block Coordinate Descent for Sparse NMF" by Potluru, V.K., Plis, S.M., Le Roux, J., Pearlmutter, B.A., Calhoun, V.D. and Hayes, T.P. was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
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- Date: May 1, 2013
Where: Emerging Technologies for 3D Video: Creation, Coding, Transmission and Rendering
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The article "Depth Based 3D Video Formats and Coding Technology" by Vetro, A. and Muller, K. was published in the book Emerging Technologies for 3D Video: Creation, Coding, Transmission and Rendering.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, April 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Joe Santos, MIT Sloan Abstract 
A "local innovation" and a "global innovation" should not be distinct because of their use or market (which could be universal or worldwide in both cases) but rather because of where they came to be: a "global innovation" is an innovation from the World; a "local innovation" is an innovation from one place. Most innovations around us, be it product innovations, technology or process innovations, and business model or strategy innovations, are "local". I will argue that as the World become more global, the likelihood and value of "local innovations" will diminish and that "global innovations" are fast becoming more relevant in shaping company performance. But "global innovations", unlike "local innovations", do not just occur through some mix of creativity, serendipity and entrepreneurship. The process of "global innovation" must be managed -- and this applies particularly to breakthrough innovations. My presentation demonstrates such propositions and covers the critical challenges faced by those who manage global innovation. I will also present some solutions from our research on this matter over the last fifteen years or so.
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- Date: April 8, 2013
Where: Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC)
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
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- Date: April 7, 2013
Where: IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Jianlin Guo; Kieran Parsons
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Load Balanced Routing for Low Power and Lossy Networks" by Liu, X., Guo, J., Bhatti, G., Orlik, P. and Parsons, K. was presented at the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).
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- Date: April 1, 2013
Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Support Vector Shape: A Classifier Based Shape Representation" by Nguyen, H. V. and Porikli, F. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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- Date: March 25, 2013
Where: National Convention of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
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- Date & Time: Thursday, March 21, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Konstantinos Tsianos, McGill, Montreal, Canada
MERL Host: Petros T. Boufounos Abstract 
Distributed algorithms become necessary to employ the computational resources needed for solving the large scale optimization problems that arise in areas such as machine learning,computation biology and others. We study a very general distributed setting where the data is distributed over many machines that can communicate with one another over a network that does not have any specialized communication infrastructure. In this setting the role of the network becomes critical in the performance of a distributed algorithm. From a more theoretical standpoint we discuss two questions: 1) How many nodes should we use for a given problem before communication becomes a bottleneck? and 2) How often should the nodes communicate to one another for the communication cost to be worth the transmission? In addition, we discuss some more practical issue that one needs to consider in implementing algorithms that are asynchronous and robust to communication delays.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, March 21, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Antonio Ortega, University of Southern California
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract 
Graphs have long been used in a wide variety of problems, such analysis of social networks, machine learning, network protocol optimization, decoding of LDPCs or image processing. Techniques based on spectral graph theory provide a "frequency" interpretation of graph data and have proven to be quite popular in multiple applications.
In the last few years, a growing amount of work has started extending and complementing spectral graph techniques, leading to the emergence of "Graph Signal Processing" as a broad research field. A common characteristic of this recent work is that it considers the data attached to the vertices as a "graph-signal" and seeks to create new techniques (filtering, sampling, interpolation), similar to those commonly used in conventional signal processing (for audio, images or video), so that they can be applied to these graph signals.
In this talk, we first introduce some of the basic tools needed in developing new graph signal processing operations. We then introduce our design of wavelet filterbanks of graphs, which for the first time provides a multi-resolution, critically-sampled, frequency- and graph-localized transforms for graph signals. We conclude by providing several examples of how these new transforms and tools can be applied to existing problems. Time permitting, we will discuss applications to image processing, depth video compression, recommendation system design and network optimization.
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- Date: March 20, 2013
Where: Data Compression Conference (DCC)
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - The paper "Efficient Coding of Signal Distances Using Universal Quantized Embeddings" by Boufounos, P.T. and Rane, S. was presented at the Data Compression Conference (DCC).
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- Date: March 17, 2013
Where: Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC)
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "A Baud-Rate Sampled Coherent Transceiver with Digital Pulse Shaping and Interpolation" by Millar, D., Lavery, D., Maher, R., Thomsen, B.C., Bayvel, P. and Savory, S.J. was presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC).
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- Date: March 17, 2013
Where: IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC)
MERL Contact: Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Generalized DC-link Voltage Balancing Control Method for Multilevel Inverters" by Deng, Y., Teo, K.H. and Harley, R.G. was presented at the IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC).
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- Date: March 14, 2013
Where: SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing Brief - The article "Absolute Value Preconditioning for Symmetric Indefinite Linear Systems" by Vecharynski, E. and Knyazev, A.V. was published in SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing.
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- Date: March 14, 2013
Where: Proceedings of the IEEE
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The article "Wireless Power Transfer: Metamaterials and Array of Coupled Resonators" by Wang, B., Yerazunis, W. and Teo, K.H. was published in Proceedings of the IEEE.
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