Yuri Ivanov

MERL Research / Technical Staff
Principal Technical Staff
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001

Phone: 617 621 7592
Email:



I joined MERL in January of 2005.  My main research interests lie in the gray area of building things that have the mind of their own, but nevertheless are simple to use and interact with.  I have done a lot of work in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Data Mining and such.  In particular, I am interested in dynamic observations - video sequences, sounds, gestures, actions and events.  And just to narrow it down a little more - call it "on-line" and I am all there!

I received an MS degree in EECS from the State Academy of Air and Space, Russia, in 1992, MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT in 1998 and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in 2001.  In the time following my graduation before joining MERL I worked for Honda Research Institute, US.  I also hold a visiting appointment with MIT department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.  For the past 3 years I co-taught a graduate course on pattern recognition for machine vision at MIT.

Recent Projects:

Ambient Intelligence for Better Buildings
Integrated Event Recognition

Recent Publications:

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

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 Press, 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)

Ivanov, Y.; Hamid, R., "Weighted Ensemble Boosting for Robust Activity Recognition in Video", International Conference on Computer vision and Graphics (ICCVG), September 2006 (ICCVG 2006, TR2006-080)

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)

Recent Technical Reports:

TR2007-069 The MERL Motion Detector Dataset: 2007 Workshop on Massive Datasets