- Date & Time: Monday, June 25, 2012; 10:30 AM
Speaker: Prof. Toshiyuki Ohtsuka, Osaka University
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract - In this talk, a real-time algorithm for nonlinear model predictive control and its applications will be introduced. The continuation method is combined with an efficient linear solver GMRES to trace the time-dependent optimal solution without iterative searches. Applications of the algorithm include position control of an underactuated hovercraft, route tracking of a ship with redundant actuators, and path generation for an automobile. Automatic code generation by symbolic computation and other related topics will also be introduced.
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- Date: June 16, 2012
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Connecting the Dots in Multi-Class Classification: From Nearest Subspace to Collaborative Representation" by Chi, Y. and Porikli, F., "Decomposing Global Light Transport using Time of Flight Imaging" by Wu, D., O'Toole, M., Velten, A., Agrawal, A. and Raskar, R., "Changedetection.net: A New Change Detection Benchmark Dataset" by Goyette, N., Jodoin, P.-M., Porikli, F., Konrad, J. and Ishwar, P. and "A Theory of Multi-Layer Flat Refractive Geometry" by Agrawal, A., Ramalingam, S., Taguchi, Y. and Chari, V. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: June 10, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "Non-coherent ToA Estimation for UWB Multipath Channels using Max-eigenvalue Detection" by Shi, W., Annavajjala, R., Orlik, P.V., Molisch, A.F., Ochiari, M. and Taira, A. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
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- Date: June 4, 2012
Where: CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Offline Force Control and Feedrate Scheduling for Complex Free Form Surfaces in 5-Axis Milling" by Layegh, S.E., Erdim, H. and Lazoglu, I. was presented at the CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting.
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- Date: June 1, 2012
Where: Computer-Aided Design
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "High Accuracy NC Milling Simulation Using Composite Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields" by Sullivan, A., Erdim, H., Perry, R.N. and Frisken, S.F. was published in Computer-Aided Design.
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- Date: May 21, 2012
Where: IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia (ISGT Asia)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The paper "Two-Level State Estimation Method for Power Systems with SCADA and PMU Measurements" by Sun, H., Wang, Z. and Nikovski, D. was presented at IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia (ISGT Asia).
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- Date: May 21, 2012
Where: International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) Brief - The papers "Visualizing Set-valued Attributes in Parallel with Equal-height Histograms" by Wittenburg, K., Malizia, A., Lupo, L. and Pekhteryev, G. and "Envisioning Grid Vulnerabilities: Multi-dimensional Visualization for Electrical Grid Planning" by Romero, R., Diez, D., Wittenburg, K. and Diaz, P. were presented at the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI).
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- Date: May 14, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Voting-based Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly Using a 3D Sensor" by Choi, C., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Liu, M.-Y. and Ramalingam, S., "Convex Bricks: A New Primitive for Visual Hull Modeling and Reconstruction" by Chari, V., Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S. and "Coverage Optimized Active Learning for k - NN Classifiers" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F. and Papanikolopoulos, N. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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- Date: May 8, 2012
Where: The International Journal of Robotics Research
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Fast Object Localization and Pose Estimation in Heavy Clutter for Robotic Bin Picking" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, O., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Chellappa, R. was published in The International Journal of Robotics Research.
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- Date: May 7, 2012
Where: Picture Coding Symposium (PCS)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Predictive Coding of Intra Prediction Modes for High Efficiency Video Coding" by Xu, X., Cohen, R., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. was presented at the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS).
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- Date: May 6, 2012
Where: IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC)
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Improved and Opportunistic Interference Alignment Schemes for Multi-Cell Interference Channels" by Gou, T., Koike-Akino, T. and Orlik, P. was presented at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC).
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- Date: April 23, 2012
Where: Optics Express
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Kieran Parsons
Research Area: Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The article "Mode-evolution-based Polarization Rotator-splitter Design via Simple Fabrication Process" by Yuan, W., Kojima, K., Wang, B., Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., Nishikawa, S. and Yagyu, E. was published in Optics Express.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, April 12, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Stefanie Jegelka, UC Berkeley
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - Graph cuts that represent pairwise Markov random fields have been a popular tool in computer vision, but they have some well-known shortcomings that arise from their locality and conditional independence assumptions. We therefore extend graph cuts to "cooperative cuts", where "cooperating" graph edges incur a lower combined cost. This cooperation is modeled by submodular functions on edges. The resulting family of global energy functions includes recent models in computer vision and also new critieria which e.g. significantly improve image segmentation results for finely structured objects and for images with variation in contrast. While "minimum cooperative cut" is NP-hard, the underlying indirect submodularity and the graph structure enable efficient approximations.
In the second part of the talk, I will switch topics and briefly address Hilbert space embeddings of distributions. With the kernel trick, such embeddings help generalize clustering objectives to consider higher-order moments of distributions instead of merely point locations.
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- Date: April 1, 2012
Where: Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Variable Focus Video: Reconstructing Depth and Video for Dynamic Scenes" by Shroff, N., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Agrawal, A. and Chellappa, R. was presented at the Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on.
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- Date: April 1, 2012
Where: European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "SAR Despeckle Filtering by Sparse Coding on Affinity Nets (SCAN)" by Porikli, F., Sundaresan, R. and Suwa, K. was presented at the European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR).
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- Date: March 31, 2012
Where: International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Latent Dirichlet Reallocation for Term Swapping" by Heaukulani, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML).
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- Date & Time: Friday, March 30, 2012; 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: Kyoto, Japan
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro co-organized a Special Session of ICASSP 2012 on Signal-Processing Challenges and Opportunities in Depth Cameras. ICASSP 2012 will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in March 2012.
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- Date: March 26, 2012
Where: European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Analysis on Wireless Power Transfer to Moving Devices Based on Array of Resonators" by Wang, B., Ellstein, D. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP).
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- Date: March 25, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jonathan Le Roux; Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The papers "Dictionary Learning Based Pan-Sharpening" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T., "Multiple Dictionary Learning for Blocking Artifacts Reduction" by Wang, Y. and Porikli, F., "A Compressive Phase-Locked Loop" by Schnelle, S.R., Slavinsky, J.P., Boufounos, P.T., Davenport, M.A. and Baraniuk, R.G., "Indirect Model-based Speech Enhancement" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "A Clustering Approach to Optimize Online Dictionary Learning" by Rao, N. and Porikli, F., "Parametric Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection: Exploiting Persymmetric Structure" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H., "Additive Noise Removal by Sparse Reconstruction on Image Affinity Nets" by Sundaresan, R. and Porikli, F. and "Depth Sensing Using Active Coherent Illumination" by Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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- Date: March 22, 2012
Where: Journal of Applied Physics
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The article "Magnetic Superlens-enhanced Inductive Coupling for Wireless Power Transfer" by Huang, D., Urzhumov, Y., Smith, D.R., Teo, K.H. and Zhang, J. was published in Journal of Applied Physics.
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- Date & Time: Friday, March 16, 2012; 10:00 AM
Speaker: Prof. Francesco Borrelli, UC Berkeley
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract - Forecasts will play an increasingly important role in the next generation of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. In nominal conditions, predictions of system dynamics, human behavior and environmental envelope can be used by the control algorithm to improve safety and performance of the resulting system. However, in practice, constraint satisfaction, performance guarantees and real-time computation are challenged by the (1) growing complexity of the engineered system, (2) uncertainty in the human/machine interaction and (3) uncertainty in the environment where the system operates.
In this talk I will present the theory and tools that we have developed over the past ten years for the systematic design of predictive controllers for uncertain linear and nonlinear systems. I will first provide an overview of our theoretical efforts. Then, I will focus on our recent results in addressing constraint satisfaction and real-time computation in nonlinear systems and large-scale networked systems. Throughout the talk I will use two applications to motivate our research and show the benefits of the proposed techniques: Safe Autonomous Cars and Green Intelligent Buildings.
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- Date: March 13, 2012
Where: Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Speech Enhancement by Indirect VTS" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, March 8, 2012; 9:30 AM
Speaker: Prof. Masayuki Inaba, Professor, Director of JSK Robotics Lab<br />
Department of Creative Informatics<br />
Department of Mechano-Informatics<br />
Graduate School of Information Technology and Science<br />
The University of Tokyo Abstract - This talk introduces a history and ongoing activities of the research and development in JSK Robotics Lab, The University of Tokyo including hand-eye coordination in rope handling, correlation-based tracking vision, vision-based robotics, wireless remote-brained approach, whole-body behaviors on humanoids, tactile deformable devices for robot sensor suit, musculoskeletal spined humanoids, power systems for human speed and torque perfomance, learning and assistive activities on HRP2 (Japanese Humanoid Robot Project Platform) and PR2 (Willow Garages's Personal Robot Platform for Open Source Robot Operating System:ROS), common software architecture in all JSK robots, and their mother environment for inherited research and development in JSK.
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- Date: March 8, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The article "Persymmetric Parametric Adaptive Matched Filter for Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H. was published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
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- Date: March 5, 2012
Where: IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT)
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Metamaterials for Wireless Power Transfer" by Wang, B. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT).
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