- Date: May 4, 2022
MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Robotics
Brief - Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision Group, will present an overview of the Robot Perception research published by MERL for advanced manipulation. The talk will mainly cover topics pertaining to robotic manipulation in unstructured environments such as machine vision, tactile sensing and autonomous grasping. The seminar will also cover specific perception problems in non-prehensile interactions such as Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization and Tactile Classification, and is intended for a broader audience.
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- Date: April 18, 2022
Where: Boston, MA
MERL Contact: Yanting Ma Brief - Researcher, Yanting Ma, qualified for and completed the Boston Marathon on Monday April 18th. We would like to congratulate her on achieving this personal goal in an impressive time of 3:18.48!!
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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 10, 2022
Where: Department of Mathematics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan will present the Optimization and System Theorem seminar in the Department of Mathematics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The title of the talk is Recursive McCormick Linearizations of Multilinear Programs: Minimum Size Formulations.
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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: February 24, 2022
Research Areas: Control, Optimization
Brief - Rien Quirynen has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Journal of Optimal Control Applications and Methods (OCAM) as an Associate Editor.
OCAM provides a forum for papers on the full range of optimal control and related control design methods. The aim is to encourage new developments in optimal control theory and design methodologies that may lead to advances in real control applications.
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- Date: July 5, 2022 - July 7, 2022
MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
Brief - The Benelux meeting is an annual conference gathering of the scientific community of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg around systems and control. It is especially intended for PhD researchers and a number of activities are dedicated to them, including plenary talks and a mini-course.
Dr. Benosman has been invited to give the mini-course of the 2022 edition of the conference. This course, entitled 'A hybrid approach to control: classical control theory meets machine learning theory', will be centered around the topic of safe and robust machine learning-based control.
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- Date: February 3, 2022
MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
Research Areas: Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
Brief - Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's computer vision group, has been invited to join the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology. This committee defines standard terms relevant to human-robot interaction in service, social, education, industrial, and research robotic applications. It establishes and defines a common terminology for practitioners and users of human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies. It is also intended to address issues common within the field of HRI, particularly surrounding the use of inconsistent and/or conflicting terms and definitions.
The invitation is a recognition of Radu's excellent record of robotics research and a significant opportunity for him to contribute to new standards in robotics terminology.
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- Date: May 31, 2022
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan from MERL's Data Analytics group has been invited to serve on the The Howard Rosenbrock Prize committee. Instituted in 2015, Optimization and Engineering journal's Howard Rosenbrock Prize is awarded annually to honor the authors of the best paper published in the journal in the previous year.
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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: December 20, 2021
Awarded to: Joshua Rapp
MERL Contact: Joshua Rapp
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
Brief - Joshua Rapp has won the 2021 Best PhD Dissertation Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
The award recognizes a PhD thesis completed on a signal processing subject within the past three years for its relevant work in signal processing while stimulating further research in the field.
Dr. Rapp completed his PhD at Boston University in 2020 with a thesis entitled "Probabilistic Modeling for Single-Photon Lidar." The dissertation tackles challenges of the acquisition and processing of 3D depth maps reconstructed from time-of-flight data captured one photon at a time.
The award will be presented at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in France.
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- Date: December 14, 2021
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL researcher Uroš Kalabić has been appointed to serve as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
The Transactions on Control Systems Technology bridge the gap between the theory and practice of control engineering. They feature publications on engineering needed to implement practical control systems.
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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: January 1, 2022
Awarded to: Petros T. Boufounos
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL’s Petros Boufounos has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 2022, for “contributions to compressed sensing.”
IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
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- Date: November 18, 2021
Awarded to: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino's research activities in communications, error control coding and optical technologies at MERL have earned him election as a Fellow Member of Optica (formerly OSA), the foremost professional association in optics and photonics worldwide. Fellow membership in Optica is limited to no more than ten percent of the membership and is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Koike-Akino is one of 106 members from 24 countries in Optica’s 2022 Fellows Class, elected during the Board of Directors of Optica meeting held on 2nd of November, 2021.
“Congratulations to the 2022 Optica Fellows,” said 2021 President Connie Chang-Hasnain, University of California, Berkeley, USA. “These members exemplify what it means to be a leader in optics and photonics. Your election, by your peers, confirms the important contributions made within our field. Thank you for your dedication to Optica, and for advancing the science of light.”
Koike-Akino's elevation to Fellow is specifically “for outstanding and innovative contributions to R&D in enabling technologies for optical communications, including nonlinear equalizers, high-dimensional modulations, and FEC (Forward Error Correction),” said Meredith Smith, Director, Optica Awards and Honors Office. "Again, congratulations on joining this esteemed group of Optica members."
About Optica
Optica (formerly OSA) is dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in optics and photonics worldwide. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica’s renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement.
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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: November 11, 2021
Awarded to: Niklas Smedemark-Margulies, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Deniz Erdogmus
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Signal Processing, Human-Computer Interaction
Brief - The MERL Signal Processing group achieved first place in the cross-subject transfer learning task and fourth place overall in the NeurIPS 2021 BEETL AI Challenge for EEG Transfer Learning. The team included Niklas Smedemark-Margulies (intern from Northeastern University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, and Prof. Deniz Erdogmus (Northeastern University). The challenge addresses two types of transfer learning tasks for EEG Biosignals: a homogeneous transfer learning task for cross-subject domain adaptation; and a heterogeneous transfer learning task for cross-data domain adaptation. There were 110+ registered teams in this competition, MERL ranked 1st in the homogeneous transfer learning task, 7th place in the heterogeneous transfer learning task, and 4th place for the combined overall score. For the homogeneous transfer learning task, MERL developed a new pre-shot learning framework based on feature disentanglement techniques for robustness against inter-subject variation to enable calibration-free brain-computer interfaces (BCI). MERL is invited to present our pre-shot learning technique at the NeurIPS 2021 workshop.
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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: November 4, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro has been elected as a Member-at-Large to serve on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He will serve a three-year term from January 2022 until December 2024.
The Board of Governors (BoG) is the governing body that oversees the activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The SPS BoG has the responsibility of establishing and implementing policy, and receiving reports from its standing boards and committees. Members-at-Large represent the member view point in the Board decision-making. They typically review, discuss, and act upon a wide range of items affecting the actions, activities, and health of the Society.
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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 17, 2021 - October 31, 2021
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022.
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- Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
Where: 2022 IEEE ICC
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Signal Processing Group, organizes a workshop in 2022 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 Huawei Technology, Princeton University, 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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