- Date: December 5, 2022
Where: Cancun, Mexico
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning
Brief - Karl Berntorp was an invited speaker at the workshop on Gaussian Process Learning-Based Control organized at the Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2022 in Cancun, Mexico.
The talk was part of a tutorial-style workshop aimed to provide insight into the fundamentals behind Gaussian processes for modeling and control and sketching some of the open challenges and opportunities using Gaussian processes for modeling and control. The talk titled ``Gaussian Processes for Learning and Control: Opportunities for Real-World Impact" described some of MERL's efforts in using Gaussian processes (GPs) for learning and control, with several application examples and discussing some of the key benefits and limitations with using GPs for learning-based control.
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- Date: November 29, 2022 - December 9, 2022
Where: NeurIPS 2022
MERL Contacts: Moitreya Chatterjee; Anoop Cherian; Michael J. Jones; Suhas Lohit
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researchers are presenting 5 papers at the NeurIPS Conference, which will be held in New Orleans from Nov 29-Dec 1st, with virtual presentations in the following week. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning.
MERL papers in NeurIPS 2022:
1. “AVLEN: Audio-Visual-Language Embodied Navigation in 3D Environments” by Sudipta Paul, Amit Roy-Chowdhary, and Anoop Cherian
This work proposes a unified multimodal task for audio-visual embodied navigation where the navigating agent can also interact and seek help from a human/oracle in natural language when it is uncertain of its navigation actions. We propose a multimodal deep hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for solving this challenging task that allows the agent to learn when to seek help and how to use the language instructions. AVLEN agents can interact anywhere in the 3D navigation space and demonstrate state-of-the-art performances when the audio-goal is sporadic or when distractor sounds are present.
2. “Learning Partial Equivariances From Data” by David W. Romero and Suhas Lohit
Group equivariance serves as a good prior improving data efficiency and generalization for deep neural networks, especially in settings with data or memory constraints. However, if the symmetry groups are misspecified, equivariance can be overly restrictive and lead to bad performance. This paper shows how to build partial group convolutional neural networks that learn to adapt the equivariance levels at each layer that are suitable for the task at hand directly from data. This improves performance while retaining equivariance properties approximately.
3. “Learning Audio-Visual Dynamics Using Scene Graphs for Audio Source Separation” by Moitreya Chatterjee, Narendra Ahuja, and Anoop Cherian
There often exist strong correlations between the 3D motion dynamics of a sounding source and its sound being heard, especially when the source is moving towards or away from the microphone. In this paper, we propose an audio-visual scene-graph that learns and leverages such correlations for improved visually-guided audio separation from an audio mixture, while also allowing predicting the direction of motion of the sound source.
4. “What Makes a "Good" Data Augmentation in Knowledge Distillation - A Statistical Perspective” by Huan Wang, Suhas Lohit, Michael Jones, and Yun Fu
This paper presents theoretical and practical results for understanding what makes a particular data augmentation technique (DA) suitable for knowledge distillation (KD). We design a simple metric that works very well in practice to predict the effectiveness of DA for KD. Based on this metric, we also propose a new data augmentation technique that outperforms other methods for knowledge distillation in image recognition networks.
5. “FeLMi : Few shot Learning with hard Mixup” by Aniket Roy, Anshul Shah, Ketul Shah, Prithviraj Dhar, Anoop Cherian, and Rama Chellappa
Learning from only a few examples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Recent approaches show benefits by learning a feature extractor on the abundant and labeled base examples and transferring these to the fewer novel examples. However, the latter stage is often prone to overfitting due to the small size of few-shot datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-based criteria to synthetically produce “hard” and useful data by mixing up real data samples. Our approach leads to state-of-the-art results on various computer vision few-shot benchmarks.
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- Date: May 28, 2023 - June 1, 2023
Where: Rome, Italy
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Connectivity & Information Processing Team, organizes the second international workshop in 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The workshop is titled, "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks," and aims to bring researchers for technical discussion on fundamental and practically relevant questions to many emerging challenges in industrial private wireless networks. This workshop is also being organized with the help of other researchers from industry and academia such as Huawei Technology, University of South Florida, Aalborg University, Jinan University, and South China University of Technology. IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society's flagship conferences.
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- Date: August 25, 2022
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling
Brief - MERL researcher Saleh Nabi was interviewed by Globest.com regarding the use of airflow optimization for smarter energy use and disease prevention. The article titled "High Tech Airflow Control for Smarter Energy Use: Reducing costs and improving effectiveness means a lot of tricky math" was recently published and describes how the solutions to complex fluid dynamical equations leads to improved HVAC control.
Globest.com is a trusted and independent team of experts providing commercial real estate professionals with comprehensive coverage and best practices necessary to innovate and build their businesses. More details about Globest can be found here: https://www.globest.com/static/about-us/
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- Date: October 10, 2022 - October 11, 2022
Where: University of Freiburg, Germany
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - Rien Quirynen is an invited speaker at an international workshop on Embedded Optimization and Learning for Robotics and Mechatronics, which is organized by the ELO-X project at the University of Freiburg in Germany. This talk, entitled "Embedded learning, optimization and predictive control for autonomous vehicles", presents recent results from multiple projects at MERL that leverage embedded optimization, machine learning and optimal control for autonomous vehicles.
This workshop is part of the ELO-X Fall School and Workshop. Invited external lecturers will present state-of-the-art techniques and applications in the field of Embedded Optimization and Learning. ELO-X is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program.
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- Date: September 21, 2022
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) invites qualified postdoctoral candidates to apply for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This position provides early career scientists the opportunity to work at a unique, academically-oriented industrial research laboratory. Successful candidates will be expected to define and pursue their own original research agenda, explore connections to established laboratory initiatives, and publish high impact articles in leading venues. Please refer to our web page for further details.
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- Date: August 22, 2022
MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - IEEE has announced that the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Prof. Alex Waibel (CMU/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), “For pioneering contributions to spoken language translation and supporting technologies.” Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), which has become the new sponsor of this prestigious award in 2022, extends our warmest congratulations to Prof. Waibel.
MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Dr. Chiori Hori, who worked with Dr. Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University and collaborated with him as part of national projects on speech summarization and translation, comments on his invaluable contributions to the field: “He has contributed not only to the invention of groundbreaking technology in speech and spoken language processing but also to the promotion of an abundance of research projects through international research consortiums by linking American, European, and Asian research communities. Many of his former laboratory members and collaborators are now leading R&D in the AI field.”
The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing. This award has recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields. MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of speech and audio processing through its sponsorship of this award.
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- Date: June 8, 2022
Where: 2022 American Control Conference
MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Christopher R. Laughman
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Researchers from EPFL (Wenjie Xu, Colin Jones) and EMPA (Bratislav Svetozarevic), in collaboration with MERL researchers Ankush Chakrabarty and Chris Laughman, recently won the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at the 2022 American Control Conference for their work on "VABO: Violation-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Closed-Loop Performance Optimization with Unmodeled Constraints" out of 19 nominations and 3 finalists. The paper describes a data-driven framework for optimizing the performance of constrained control systems by systematically re-evaluating how cautiously/aggressively one should explore the search space to avoid sustained, large-magnitude constraint violations while tolerating small violations, and demonstrates these methods on a physics-based model of a vapor compression cycle.
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- Date: June 8, 2022 - June 10, 2022
Where: Atlanta, GA
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Abraham P. Vinod; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the American Control Conference in Atlanta, GA, MERL presented 9 papers on subjects including autonomous-vehicle decision making and motion planning, realtime Bayesian inference and learning, reference governors for hybrid systems, Bayesian optimization, and nonlinear control.
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- Date: May 23, 2022 - May 27, 2022
Where: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Pedro Miraldo; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researchers presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) that was held in Philadelphia from May 23-27, 2022. The papers covered a broad range of topics from manipulation, tactile sensing, planning and multi-agent control. The invited talk was presented in the "Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Work of the Future" which covered some of the work done by MERL researchers on collaborative robotic assembly. The workshop was co-organized by MERL, Mitsubishi Electric Automation's North America Development Center (NADC), and MIT.
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- Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
Where: Seoul, Korea
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL Connectivity & Information Processing Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2022, held in Seoul Korea on May 16-20, 2022. Topics presented include recent advancements in communications technologies, deep learning methods, and quantum machine learning (QML). Presentation videos are also found on our YouTube channel. In addition, K. J. Kim organized "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks Workshop" at the conference.
IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society’s flagship conferences (ICC and Globecom). Each year, close to 2,000 attendees from over 70 countries attend IEEE ICC to take advantage of a program which consists of exciting keynote session, robust technical paper sessions, innovative tutorials and workshops, and engaging industry sessions. This 5-day event is known for bringing together audiences from both industry and academia to learn about the latest research and innovations in communications and networking technology, share ideas and best practices, and collaborate on future projects.
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- Date: April 1, 2022
Where: INFORMS Journal on Computing (https://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/ijoc)
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan co-authored a publication titled "JANOS: An Integrated Predictive and Prescriptive Modeling Framework" which has been chosen as a Featured Article in the current issue of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. The article was co-authored with Prof. David Bergman, a collaborator of MERL and Teng Huang, a former MERL intern, among others.
The paper describes a new software tool, JANOS, that integrates predictive modeling and discrete optimization to assist decision making. Specifically, the proposed solver takes as input user-specified pretrained predictive models and formulates optimization models directly over those predictive models by embedding them within an optimization model through linear transformations.
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- Date: May 4, 2022
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Optimization, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino gave an invited lecture on advanced photonic devices at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Technology Fair on May 4, 2022. Topics of the lecture included the recent progress of applied artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for optical systems, nano-photonic devices, and quantum technology. During the 2-hour interactive online presentation, he lectured to more than 200 patent examiner participants.
USPTO Tech Fair Organizer mentioned:
"Thank you very much for representing Advanced Photonic Devices at this year’s Technology Center 2800 Virtual Tech Fair held May 4th, 2022. Tech Fair is an important part of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Examiner Technical Training Program (PETTP). Having a scientifically well-trained examiner workforce and ensuring the quality, consistency, and reliability of issued patents are top priorities at the USPTO. The PETTP is designed to achieve those priorities by giving examiners direct access to technical experts who are willing to share their knowledge about prior art and industry standards for both emerging and established technologies. Experts like yourself help to maintain our high quality of patent examination by keeping examiners updated on technologies and innovations pertinent to their field of examination.
We very much appreciate your efforts, time, and contributions."
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- Date: June 19, 2022
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL Researcher Rui Ma will give an invited talk titled "All Digital Transmitter with GaN Switching Mode Power Amplifiers"at a technical workshop during International Microwave Symposium (IMS)2022. This IMS workshop (WSN) invites members from academia and industry to discuss the latest development activities in the area of digital-intensive power amplifiers and transmitters for RF communications.
In addition, Dr. Rui Ma is chairing a Technical Session(We2C) on "AI/ML on RF and mmWave Applications" at IMS2022.
IMS is the flagship annual conference of IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society(MTT-S).
Learn more here:
Sessions
Workshops
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- Date: March 15, 2022
Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Takenori Sumi, Benjamin A. Rolfe and Hiroshi Mineno
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning
Brief - MELCO/MERL research paper “Sub-1 GHz Frequency Band Wireless Coexistence for the Internet of Things” has won the 37th Telecommunications Advancement Foundation Award (Telecom System Technology Award) in Japan. This award started in 1984, and is given to research papers and works related to information and telecommunications that have made significant contributions and achievements to the advancement, development, and standardization of information and telecommunications from technical and engineering perspectives. The award recognizes both the IEEE 802.19.3 standardization efforts and the technological advancements using reinforcement learning and robust access methodologies for wireless communication system. This year, there were 43 entries with 5 winning awards and 3 winning encouragement awards. This is the first time MELCO/MERL has received this award. Our paper has been published by IEEE Access in 2021 and authors are Yukimasa Nagai, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Takenori Sumi, Benjamin A. Rolfe and Hiroshi Mineno.
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- Date: March 1, 2022
Where: Online/Zoom
MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Devesh Jha, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave an invited talk at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, NYU. The title of the talk was "Robotic Manipulation in the Wild: Planning, Learning and Control through Contacts". The talk presented some of the recent work done at MERL for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments in the presence of significant uncertainty.
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- Date: March 1, 2022
MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Tim K. Marks; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL's research on scene-aware interaction was recently featured in an IEEE Spectrum article. The article, titled "At Last, A Self-Driving Car That Can Explain Itself" and authored by MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Chiori Hori and MERL Director Anthony Vetro, gives an overview of MERL's efforts towards developing a system that can analyze multimodal sensing information for highly natural and intuitive interaction with humans through context-dependent generation of natural language. The technology recognizes contextual objects and events based on multimodal sensing information, such as images and video captured with cameras, audio information recorded with microphones, and localization information measured with LiDAR.
Scene-Aware Interaction for car navigation, one target application that the article focuses on, will provide drivers with intuitive route guidance. Scene-Aware Interaction technology is expected to have wide applicability, including human-machine interfaces for in-vehicle infotainment, interaction with service robots in building and factory automation systems, systems that monitor the health and well-being of people, surveillance systems that interpret complex scenes for humans and encourage social distancing, support for touchless operation of equipment in public areas, and much more. MERL's Scene-Aware Interaction Technology had previously been featured in a Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release.
IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. IEEE Spectrum has a circulation of over 400,000 engineers worldwide, making it one of the leading science and engineering magazines.
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- Date: January 24, 2022
Where: The TWIML AI Podcast
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Speech & Audio Senior Team Leader Jonathan Le Roux was featured in an extended interview on the popular TWIML AI Podcast, presenting MERL's work towards solving the "cocktail party problem". Humans have the extraordinary ability to focus on particular sounds of interest within a complex acoustic scene, such as a cocktail party. MERL's Speech & Audio Team has been at the forefront of the field's effort to develop algorithms giving machines similar abilities. Jonathan talked with host Sam Charrington about the group's decade-long journey on this topic, from early pioneering work using deep learning for speech enhancement and speech separation, to recent works on weakly-supervised separation, hierarchical sound separation, as well as the separation of real-world soundtracks into speech, music, and sound effects (aka the "cocktail fork problem").
The TWIML AI podcast, formerly known as This Week in Machine Learning & AI, was created in 2016 and is followed by more than 10,000 subscribers on Youtube and Twitter. Jonathan's interview marks the 555th episode of the podcast.
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- Date & Time: December 9, 2021; 7pm EST
Where: virtual
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Signal Processing group, Network Intelligence Team) is giving an invited talk titled, `Evolution of Machine Learning for Photonic Research' for the Boston Photonic Chapter of the IEEE Photonic Society on December 9. The talk covers recent MERL research on machine learning for nonlinearity compensation and nanophotonic device design.
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- Date: November 17, 2021
Awarded to: Elevators and Escalators Division of Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc.
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - The Elevators and Escalators Division of Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc. has been recognized as a 2022 CES® Innovation Awards honoree for its new PureRide™ Touchless Control for elevators, jointly developed with MERL. Sponsored by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the CES Innovation Awards is the largest and most influential technology event in the world. PureRide™ Touchless Control provides a simple, no-touch product that enables users to call an elevator and designate a destination floor by placing a hand or finger over a sensor. MERL initiated the development of PureRide™ in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic by proposing the use of infra-red sensors for operating elevator call buttons, and participated actively in its rapid implementation and commercialization, resulting in a first customer installation in October of 2020.
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- Date: December 10, 2021
Research Areas: Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL's Researcher Dr. Rui Ma is the keynote speaker for Electronic Design Innovation CON (EDICON2021) to be held in Shenzhen, China from Dec. 9-10, with a talk titled "Digitization and intelligence: unlocking the innovation of future radios". The conference brings together international researchers from academics, industry, and media distribution to share perspectives on the technology needed and being developed for the next generation of communication.
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- Date: October 21, 2021
Where: Université de Lorraine, France
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty (RS, Multiphysical Systems Team) gave an invited talk on `Bayesian-Optimized Estimation and Control for Buildings and HVAC' at the Research Center for Automatic Control (CRAN) in the University of Lorraine in France. The talk presented recent MERL research on probabilistic machine learning for set-point optimization and calibration of digital twins for building energy systems.
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- Date: October 18, 2021
Awarded to: Daniel Nikovski
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
Brief - Daniel Nikovski, Group Manager of MERL's Data Analytics group, has received an Outstanding Reviewer Award from the 2021 conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'21). NeurIPS is the world's premier conference on neural networks and related technologies.
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- Date: September 7, 2021
MERL Contact: Anoop Cherian
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - Anoop Cherian, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision group, gave an invited virtual talk on "InSeGAN: An Unsupervised Approach to Identical Instance Segmentation" at the Visual Information Laboratory of University of Bristol, UK. The talk described a new approach to segmenting varied appearances of nearly identical 3D objects in depth images. More details of the talk can be found in the following paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13865, which will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'21).
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- Date: August 12, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.
Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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