Christopher R. Wren

MERL Research / Technical Staff
Research Scientist
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000

Phone: (617) 621-7519
Email:

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Christopher Wren's research area is Perception for Human-Computer Interaction. While Chris' recent work has focused on using computer vision techniques to create systems that are visually aware of the user, his current interests also extend to include audio processing and other sensing modalities. Prior to coming to MERL, he was at the Vision & Modeling Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. As part of his dissertation work, he developed a system for combining physical models with visual evidence in real time to recover subtle models of human motion.

Recent Projects:

Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings
Integrated Event Recognition
ROCkS: Reduced Operating Cost Sensors
Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks

Recent Publications:

Wigdor, D.; Ivanov, Y.; Wren, C.R., "Soda Pop Zombies: Soft Drink Consumption and Motion", 2007 Workshop on Massive Datasets, ISBN: 978-1-59593-871-8, pp. 8-9, November 2007 (ACM Portal, TR2007-081)

Wren, C.R.; Ivanov, Y.A.; Leigh, D.; Westhues, J., "The MERL Motion Detector Dataset", Workshop on Massive Datasets (MD), ISBN: 978-1-50593-981-8, pp. 10-14, November 2007 (ACM Press, TR2007-069)

Wren, C.R.; Ivanov, Y.A., "Workshop on Massive Datasets", International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), ISBN: 978-1-59593-817-6, pp. 385, November 2007 (ACM Press)

Ivanov, Y.; Wren, C.; Sorokin, A.; Kaur, I., "Visualizing the History of Living Spaces", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, ISSN: 1077-2626, Vol. 13, Issue 6, pp. 1153-1160, Nov-Dec 2007 (IEEE Xplore, TR2007-068)

Wren, C.; Ivanov, Y.; Kaur, I; Leigh, D.; Westhues, J., "SocialMotion: Measuring the Hidden Social Life of a Building", Third International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA 2007), ISBN: 978-3-540-75159-5, Volume 4718/2007, pp. 85-102, September 2007 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, TR2007-034)

Wren, C.R.; Ivanov, Y.A.; Leigh, D.; Westhues, J., "Buzz: Measuring and Visualizing Conference Crowds", ACM SIGGRAPH, Session Emerging Technologies , Article 25, August 2007 (ACM Portal, TR2007-035)

Ivanov, Y.; Sorokin, A.; Wren, C.; Kaur, I., "Tracking People in Mixed Modality Systems", SPIE Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP), Vol. 6508, January 2007 (SPIE Publications, TR2007-011)

Wren, C.R.; Minnen, D.C.; Rao, S.G., "Similarity-based Analysis for Large Networks of Ultra-Low Resolution Sensors", Pattern Recognition, ISSN: 0031-3203, Vol. 39, Issue 10, pp. 1918-1931, October 2006 (Elsevier Science , TR2005-003)

Wren, C.R., Tapia, E.M., "Toward Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks", International Workshop on Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA), May 2006 (LoCA 2006, TR2006-011)

Ivanov, Y.A.; Wren, C.R., "Toward Spatial Queries for Spatial Surveillance Tasks", Pervasive: Workshop Pervasive Technology Applied Real-World Experiences with RFID and Sensor Networks (PTA), May 2006 (PTA 2006, TR2006-051)

Reynolds, C.J.; Wren, C.R., "Worse is Better for Ambient Sensing", Pervasive 2006: Workshop on Privacy Trust and Identity Issues for Ambient Intelligence, May 2006 (Pervasive 2006, TR2006-005)

Recent Technical Reports:

TR2005-084 Automatic Pan-Tilt-Zoom Calibration in the Presence of Hybrid Sensor Networks