Matthew Brand

MERL Research / Technical Staff
Distinguished Research Scientist
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1994

Phone: (617) 621-7500
Email:

Matthew Brand studies unsupervised learning from sensory data. One goal is to make machines that learn to realistically mimic and augment human performances; another is to optimize systems that serve the conflicting interests of large numbers of people. Recent results include spectral solutions for reconstructing manifolds from samples, decision-theoretic elevator group control, a linear-time online SVD, video-realistic synthesis of humans and nature scenes, recovery of nonrigid 3D shape from ordinary video, and an entropy optimization framework for learning. Brand has been named one of the top innovators of his generation (Technology Review 1999) and one of industry's top "R&D stars" (Industry Week 2000). Recent academic honors include best paper awards in computer vision (CVPR2001) and scheduling (ICAPS2003).

Publications:

Brand, M.; Molisach, A.F., "Delay-Energy Tradeoffs in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks with Partial Channel State Information", IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), ISSN 1930-529X, pp 1-6, November 2008 (IEEE Xplore, TR2008-078)

Brand, M.; Maymounkov, P.; Molisch, A.F., "Routing with Probabilistic Delay Guarantees in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks", IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), ISSN: 1930-529X, pp. 1-6, November 2008 (IEEE Xplore, TR2008-077)

Brand, M.; Pletscher, P., "A Conditional Random Field for Automatic Photo Editing", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), ISSN 1063-6919, pp. 1-7, June 2008 (IEEE Xplore, TR2008-035)

Nikolova, E.; Kelner, J.; Brand, M.; Mitzenmacher,M., "Stochastic Shortest Paths Via Quasi-convex Maximization", ESA 2006, ISBN:3-540-38875-3, Pp 552 - 563 , September 2006 (ACM Portal, TR2006-128)

Nikolova, E.; Brand, M.; Karger, D.R., "Optimal Route Planning under Uncertainty", International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), June 2006 (ICAPS 2006, TR2006-060)

Brand, M., "Fast Low-Rank Modifications of the Thin Singular Value Decomposition", Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Vol. 415, Issue 1, pp. 20-30, May 2006 (Elsevier Science Direct, TR2006-059)

Brand, M., "Nonrigid Embeddings for Dimensionality Reduction", European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), ISBN: 3-540-29243-8, Vol. 3720, October 2005 (Springer, TR2005-117)

Vlasic, D.; Brand, M.; Pfister, H.; Popovic, J., "Face Transfer with Multilinear Models", ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ISSN: 0730=0301, Vol. 24, Issue 3, pp. 426-433, July 2005 (ACM Press, TR2005-048)

Brand, M., "A Direct Method for 3D Factorization of Nonrigid Motion Observed in 2D", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2005 (CVPR 2005, TR2005-052)

Brand, M., "A Random Walks Perspective on Maximizing Satisfaction and Profit", SIAM Conference on Optimization, May 2005 (SIAM 2005, TR2005-050)

Nikovski, D.; Brand, M., "Exact Calculation of Expected Waiting Times for Group Elevator Control", IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, ISSN: 0018-9286, Vol. 49, Issue 10, pp. 1820-1823, October 2004 (IEEE Xplore, TR2004-148)

Nishiuma, N.; Goto, Y.; Kumazawa, H.; Nikovski, D.; Brand, M., "Traffic Prediction using Singular Value Decomposition", World Congress on ITS, October 2004 (World Congress on ITS)

Brand, M., "From Subspaces to Submanifolds", British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), September 2004 (BMVC 2004, TR2004-134)

Brand, M.; Kang, K.; Cooper, D.B., "Algebraic Solution for the Visual Hull", IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2004 (CVPR 2004, TR2004-101)

Brand, M.; Antone, M.; Teller, S., "Spectral Solution of Large-Scale Extrinsic Camera Calibration as a Graph Embedding Problem", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), May 2004 (ECCV 2004, TR2004-100)

Brand, M.E.; Nikovski, D.N., "Risk-Averse Group Elevator Scheduling", Elevcon World Congress on Vertical Transportation Technologies (ELEVCON), April 2004 (ELEVCON 2004, TR2004-045)

Brand, M.E.; Nikovski, D.N., "Optimal Parking in Group Elevator Control", IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), ISSN: 1050-4729, Vol. 1, pp. 1002-1008, April 2004 (IEEE Xplore, TR2004-044)

Brand, M., "Minimax Embeddings", Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2003 (NIPS 2003, TR2004-102)

Suzuki, N.; Iwata, M.; Sasakawa, K.; Komaya, K.; Nikovski, D.N.; Brand, M.E., "A Calculation Method of Car Arrival Time with Dynamic Programming in Elevator Group Control", Conference of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, August 2003

Brand, M.E., "Continuous Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction by Kernel Eigenmaps", International Join Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), August 2003 (IJCAI 2003, TR2003-021)

Nikovski, D.N.; Brand, M.E., "Marginalizing Out Future Passengers in Group Elevator Control", Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), ISBN: 0-127-05664-5, pp. 443-450, August 2003 (UAI 2003, TR2003-062)

Matusik, W.; Pfister, H.; Brand, M.E.; McMillan, L., "A Data-Driven Reflectance Model", ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ISSN: 0730-0301, Vol. 22, Issue 3, pp. 759-769, July 2003 (MERL BRDF Database, TR2003-083)

Matusik, W.; Pfister, H.; Brand, M.; McMillan, L., "Efficient Isotropic BRDF Measurement", Eurographics Workshop on Rendering (EGRW), June 2003 (ISSN: 1727-3463, pp. 241-247, TR2003-080)

Nikovski, D.; Brand, M., "Decision-Theoretic Group Elevator Scheduling", International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), June 2003 (ICAPS 2003, TR2003-061)

Nikovski, D.; Brand, M., "Non-Linear Stochastic Control in Continuous State Spaces by Exact Integration in Bellman's Equations", International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), June 2003 (ICAPS, TR2003-091)

Brand, M., "Fast Online SVD Revisions for Lightweight Recommender Systems", SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), May 2003 (SDM 2003, TR2003-014)

Brand, M.; Huang, K., "A Unifying Theorem for Spectral Embedding and Clustering", International Workshop On Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AI & Statistics), January 2003 (AI & Statistics 2003, TR2002-042)

Brand, M., "Charting a Manifold", Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2002 (NIPS 15, Paper AA61, TR2003-013)

Brand, M.E., "Subspace Mappings for Image Sequences", Statistical Methods in Video Processing, June 2002 (Final Program, TR2002-025)

Brand, M.E., "Incremental Singular Value Decomposition of Uncertain Data with Missing Values", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Vol 2350, pps 707-720, May 2002 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, TR2002-024)

Brand, M.E., "Morphable 3D Models from Video", IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), December 2001 (CVPR 2001, TR2001-037)

Brand, M.E.; Bhotika, R., "Flexible Flow for 3D Nonrigid Tracking and Shape Recovery", IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), ISSN: 1063-6919, Vol. 1, pp. 315-322, December 2001 (IEEE Xplore, TR2001-038)

Brand, M.E.; Kettnaker, V., "Discovery and Segmentation of Activities in Video", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), August 2000 (Vol 22, Issue 8, pps 844-851)

Brand, M.E.; Hertzmann, A., "Style Machines", ACM SIGGRAPH, ISBN: 1-58113-208-5, pps 183-192, July 2000 (Proc ACM Press, TR2000-014)

Brand, M.E., "Exploring Variational Structure by Cross-Entropy Optimization", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , June 2000 (ICML 2000)

Brand, M.E., "Shadow Puppetry", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Vol. 2, pp 1237-44, September 1999 (ICCV 1999)

Brand, M.E., "Voice Puppetry", ACM SIGGRAPH, ISBN: 0-201-48560-5, pps 21-28 , August 1999 (Proc ACM Press, TR1999-020)

Brand, M.E., "Structure Learning in Conditional Probability Models via an Eutropic Prior and Parameter Extinction", Neural Computation Journal, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 1155-1182, July 1999 (The MIT Press, TR1998-018)

Brand, M.E., "Structure and Parameter Learning via Entropy Minimization, with Applications to Mixture and Hidden Markov Models", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Vol. 3, pp. 1749-52, March 1999 (ICASSP 1999)

Brand, M.E., "Pattern Discovery via Entropy Minimization", Uncertainty 99: International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, January 1999 (AISTATS 1999, TR1998-021)

Brand, M.E.; Shan K., "Voice-Driven Animation", Workshop on Perceptual User Interfaces (PUI), November 1998 (PUI 1998 Papers, TR1998-020)

Technical Reports:
TR2002-039	Multidimensional Visualization for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems
TR1998-019	An entropic estimator for structure discovery
TR1997-025	Learning concise models of human activity from ambient video via a structure-inducing M-step estimator