News & Events

41 MERL Events and MERL Talks found.


  •  EVENT    Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics panel for students on careers in industry
    Date & Time: Monday, July 10, 2017; 6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
    Location: David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh PA
    Speaker: Andrew Knyazev and other panelists, MERL
    Brief
    • Andrew Knyazev accepted an invitation to represent MERL at the panel on Student Careers in Business, Industry and Government at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

      The format consists of a five minute introduction by each of the panelists covering their background and an overview of the mathematical and computational challenges at their organization. The introductions will be followed by questions from the students.
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  •  EVENT    MERL to participate in Xconomy Forum on AI & Robotics
    Date & Time: Tuesday, March 28, 2017; 1:30 - 5:30PM
    Location: Google (355 Main St., 5th Floor, Cambridge MA)
    MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro; Richard C. (Dick) Waters; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • How will AI and robotics reshape the economy and create new opportunities (and challenges) across industries? Who are the hottest companies that will compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Uber to create the future? And what are New England innovators doing to strengthen the local cluster and help lead the national discussion?

      MERL will be participating in Xconomy's third annual conference on AI and robotics in Boston to address these questions. MERL President & CEO, Dick Waters, will be on a panel discussing the status and future of self-driving vehicles. Lab members will also be on hand demonstrate and discuss recent advances AI and robotics technology.

      The agenda and registration for the event can be found online: https://xconomyforum85.eventbrite.com.
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  •  EVENT    MERL hosts Boston Imaging and Vision Meetup
    Date & Time: Tuesday, January 17, 2017; 6:00 pm
    Location: 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
    Speaker: Tim Marks, Esra Cansizoglu and Carl Vondrick, MERL and MIT
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • MERL was pleased to host the Boston Imaging and Vision Meetup held on January 17. The meetup is an informal gathering of people interested in the field of computer imaging and vision. According to the group's website "the meetup provides an opportunity for the image processing/computer vision community to network, socialize and learn". The event held at MERL featured three speakers, Tim Marks and Esra Cansizoglu from MERL, as well as Carl Vondrick, an MIT CS graduate student in the group of Prof. Antonio Torralba. Roughly 70 people attended to eat pizza, hear the speakers and network.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 8, 2016; 4:00-7:00pm
    Location: 201 Broadway, 8th Floor, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Snacks, demos, science: On Thursday 12/8, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) will host an open house for graduate+ students interested in internships, post-docs, and research scientist positions. The event will be held from 4-7pm and will feature demos & short presentations in our main areas of research: algorithms, multimedia, electronics, communications, computer vision, speech processing, optimization, machine learning, data analytics, mechatronics, dynamics, control, and robotics. MERL is a high impact publication-oriented research lab with very extensive internship and university collaboration programs. Most internships lead to publication; many of our interns and staff have gone on to notable careers at MERL and in academia. Come mix with our researchers, see our state of the art technologies, and learn about our research opportunities. Dress code: casual, with resumes.

      Pre-registration for the event is strongly encouraged:
      https://www.eventbrite.com/e/merl-open-house-tickets-29408503626

      Current internship and employment openings:
      http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
      http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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  •  EVENT    MERL participating in Engineering Career Fair
    Date & Time: Wednesday, November 16, 2016; 3:30-6:30pm
    Location: Sheraton Commander (16 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA)
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL will be participating in the Engineering Career Fair Collaborative, which is being held on November 16, 2016 at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge from 3:30-6:30pm. Graduate students with an interest in learning about internship and other employment opportunities at MERL are invited to visit our booth. Staff members will be on hand to discuss current openings. We will also be showing some demonstrations of current research projects.

      Current internship and employment openings:
      http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
      http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Hosts 2nd Annual Women In Science Celebration
    Date & Time: Friday, July 22, 2016; 12:00 Noon
    Location: Cambridge Brewery
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • MERL hosted its 2nd Annual "Women In Science Celebration". MERL's current team of female interns discussed and celebrated the contributions they've made during their internships at MERL.
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  •  TALK    A computational spectral graph theory tutorial
    Date & Time: Wednesday, July 13, 2016; 2:30 PM - 3:30
    Speaker: Richard Lehoucq, Sandia National Laboratories
    Research Areas: Computer Vision, Digital Video, Machine Learning
    Abstract
    • My presentation considers the research question of whether existing algorithms and software for the large-scale sparse eigenvalue problem can be applied to problems in spectral graph theory. I first provide an introduction to several problems involving spectral graph theory. I then provide a review of several different algorithms for the large-scale eigenvalue problem and briefly introduce the Anasazi package of eigensolvers.
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  •  EVENT    MERL celebrates 25 years of innovation
    Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
    Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL celebrated 25 years of innovation on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. The event was a great success, with inspiring keynote talks, insightful panel sessions, and an exciting research showcase of MERL's latest breakthroughs.

      Please visit the event page to view photos of each session, video presentations, as well as a commemorative booklet that highlights past and current research.
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  •  TALK    On computer simulation of multiscale processes in porous electrodes of Li-ion batteries
    Date & Time: Friday, May 13, 2016; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Oleg Iliev, Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics, ITWM
    Research Area: Dynamical Systems
    Abstract
    • Li-ion batteries are widely used in automotive industry, in electronic devices, etc. In this talk we will discuss challenges related to the multiscale nature of batteries, mainly the understanding of processes in the porous electrodes at pore scale and at macroscale. A software tool for simulation of isothermal and non-isothermal electrochemical processes in porous electrodes will be presented. The pore scale simulations are done on 3D images of porous electrodes, or on computer generated 3D microstructures, which have the same characterization as real porous electrodes. Finite Volume and Finite Element algorithms for the highly nonlinear problems describing processes at pore level will be shortly presented. Model order reduction, MOR, empirical interpolation method, EIM-MOR algorithms for acceleration of the computations will be discussed, as well as the reduced basis method for studying parameters dependent problems. Next, homogenization of the equations describing the electrochemical processes at the pore scale will be presented, and the results will be compared to the engineering approach based on Newman's 1D+1D model. Simulations at battery cell level will also be addressed. Finally, the challenges in modeling and simulation of degradation processes in the battery will be discussed and our first simulation results in this area will be presented.

      This is joint work with A.Latz (DLR), M.Taralov, V.Taralova, J.Zausch, S.Zhang from Fraunhofer ITWM, Y.Maday from LJLL, Paris 6 and Y.Efendiev from Texas A&M.
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  •  EVENT    MERL to celebrate 25 years of innovation
    Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
    Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • A celebration event to mark MERL's 25th anniversary will be held on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. This event will feature keynote talks, panel sessions, and a research showcase. The event itself is invitation-only, but videos and other highlights will be made available online. Further details about the program can be obtained at the link below.
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  •  EVENT    Celebrating "Women in Science at MERL" luncheon
    Date & Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2015; 12:00
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • To celebrate "Women in Science at MERL," a luncheon event was organized on August 4. Eleven female interns, three female researchers, and female members of HQ staff, interns, hosts/managers and MERL executives participated in that event. All female interns introduced their research projects and their positive experiences at MERL; female researchers shared their own career development stories; and at the end all discussed how to be successful in the field of science. Every participant was inspired to continue contributing to the future of science.
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  •  TALK    Embedded Vision R&D at Texas Instruments
    Date & Time: Friday, October 4, 2013; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Goksel Dedeoglu, Texas Instruments
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • There are growing needs to accelerate computer vision algorithms on embedded processors for wide-ranging equipment including mobile phones, network cameras, robots, and automotive safety systems. In our Vision R&D group, we conduct various projects to understand how the vision requirements can be best addressed on Digital Signal Processors (DSP), where the compute bottlenecks are, and how we should evolve our hardware & software architectures to meet our customers' future needs. Towards this end, we build prototypes wherein we design and optimize embedded software for real-world application performance and robustness. In this talk, I will provide examples of vision problems that we have recently tackled.
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  •  EVENT    CCD/PROCAMS 2013 - IEEE 2nd Workshop of Computational Cameras and Displays
    Date & Time: Friday, June 28, 2013; 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
    Location: Portland, Oregon
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • Amit Agrawal is the co-organizer of the CCD/PROCAMS 2013 Workshop of Computational Cameras and Displays.
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  •  TALK    Holistic Models for Visual Perception in Autonomous Systems
    Date & Time: Thursday, May 23, 2013; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Raquel Urtasun, TTI-Chicago
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • The development of autonomous systems that can effectively assist people with everyday tasks is one of the grand challenges in modern computer science. Notable examples are personal robotics for the elderly and people with disabilities, as well as autonomous driving systems which can help decrease fatalities caused by traffic accidents. To achieve full autonomy, multiple perception tasks must be solved: Autonomous systems should sense the environment, recognize the 3D world and interact with it. While most approaches have tackled individual perceptual components in isolation, I believe that the next generation of perceptual systems should reason jointly about multiple tasks.

      In this talk I'll argue that there are four key aspects towards developing such holistic models: (i) learning, (ii) inference (iii) representation, and (iv) data. I'll describe efficient Markov random field learning and inference algorithms that exploit both the structure of the problem as well as parallel computation to achieve computational and memory efficiency. I'll demonstrate the effectiveness of our models on a wide variety of examples, and show representations and inference strategies that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance and result in several orders of magnitude speed-ups in a variety of challenging tasks, including 3D reconstruction, 3D layout parsing, object detection, semantic segmentation and free text exploitation for holistic visual recognition.
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  •  TALK    Sensitive Manipulation
    Date & Time: Thursday, November 15, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Eduardo Torres-Jara, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • This talk presents an alternative approach to robotic manipulation. In this approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation behind this approach stems from the fact that manipulating an object necessarily implies coming into contact with it. As a result, directly sensing physical contact seems more important than vision to control the interaction of the object and the robot. In this work, the traditional approach of a highly precise arm guided by a vision system is replaced by one that uses a low mechanical impedance arm with dense tactile sensing and exploration capabilities.

      The robots OBRERO and GoBot have been built to implement this approach. We have developed a novel tactile sensing technology and mounted our sensors on the robots' hands. These sensors are biologically inspired and present adequate features for manipulation. The success of this approach is shown by picking up objects in a poorly modeled environment. This task, simple for humans, has been a challenge for robots. The robot can deal with new, unmodeled objects. Specifically, OBRERO can gently contact, explore, lift, and place an object in a different location. It can also detect basic slippage and external forces acting on an object while it is held. These tasks can be performed successfully with very light objects, without fixtures, and on slippery surfaces. Similarly, GoBot is capable of manipulating small objects such as the stones in the game GO. Both OBRERO and GoBot perform all of their manipulations using tactile feedback.
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  •  TALK    Challenges on shape acquisition of moving object
    Date & Time: Friday, August 17, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Hiroshi Kawasaki, Kagoshima University
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • In this talk, I will introduce an overview of my research projects on 3D shape acquisition of moving object. The talk mainly focuses on two parts, the first one is about our 3D shape acquisition technique using projector and camera system and the second is entire shape acquisition using multi-view pro-cam system. I also briefly cover the following topics:

      -- Theory of shape from coplanarity technique
      -- Texture recovery method on pro-cam system
      -- Future plan on medical application of our scanner

      Those researches are jointly researched by Prof. Katushi Ikeuchi (Univ. of Tokyo), Prof. Ryo Furukawa (Hiroshima city Univ) and Prof. Ryusuke Sagawa (AIST).
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  •  TALK    Applications of Mobile Augmented Reality and Pervasive Computing in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
    Date & Time: Tuesday, July 10, 2012; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Prof Vineet Kamat, University of Michigan
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • This talk will present ongoing research at the University of Michigan Laboratory for Interactive Visualization in Engineering (LIVE) that is exploring applications of mobile pervasive computing and visualization in design, engineering, and construction. Findings from three specific research projects will be presented: Interactive Visualization of Construction Operations in Mobile Outdoor Augmented Reality; Rapid Building Damage Evaluation using Augmented Reality and Structural Simulation; and Location-Aware Contextual Information Access and Retrieval for Rapid On-Site Decision Making. In each case, the development of fundamental algorithms, their implementation as reusable and modular software, and their implementation in the engineering applications will be described.
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  •  TALK    Visual 3D/4D modeling of urban places and events
    Date & Time: Friday, June 29, 2012; 2:30 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Marc Pollefeys, ETH Zurich and UNC Chapel Hill
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • One of the fundamental problems of computer vision is to extract 3D shape and motion from images. This can be achieved when a scene or object is observed from different viewpoints or over a period of time. First, we will discuss image-based 3D modeling and localization in large environments, e.g. urban 3D reconstruction from vehicle-borne cameras and (geo)localization from mobile-phone images. In this context, we will discuss some of the challenges an opportunities offered by symmetries of architectural structures. We will also discuss how changes in an urban environment can be detected from images, leading to the possibility to efficiently acquire 4D models. In addition to explicit 4D modeling of an event, we'll consider the possibility to perform interactive video-based rendering from casually captured videos.
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  •  TALK    Toward Efficient and Robust Human Pose Estimation
    Date & Time: Tuesday, June 26, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Min Sun, University of Michigan
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • Robust human pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision in that body part configurations are often subject to severe deformations and occlusions. Moreover, efficient pose estimation is often a desirable requirement in many applications. The trade-off between accuracy and efficiency has been explored in a large number of approaches. On the one hand, models with simple representations (like tree or star models) can be efficiently applied in pose estimation problems. However, these models are often prone to body part misclassification errors. On the other hand, models with rich representations (i.e., loopy graphical models) are theoretically more robust, but their inference complexity may increase dramatically. In this talk, we present an efficient and exact inference algorithm based on branch-and-bound to solve the human pose estimation problem on loopy graphical models. We show that our method is empirically much faster (about 74 times) than the state-of-the-art exact inference algorithm [Sontag et al. UAI'08]. By extending a state-of-the-art tree model [Sapp et al. ECCV'10] to a loopy graphical model, we show that the estimation accuracy improves for most of the body parts (especially lower arms) on popular datasets such as Buffy [Ferrari et al. CVPR'08] and Stickmen [Eichner and Ferrari BMVC'09] datasets. Our method can also be used to exactly solve most of the inference problems of Stretchable Models [Sapp et al. CVPR'11] on video sequences (which contains a few hundreds of variables) in just a few minutes. Finally, we show that the novel inference algorithm can potentially be used to solve human behavior understanding and biological computation problems.
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  •  TALK    Cooperative Cuts: Coupling Edges via Submodularity
    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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  •  TALK    Modeling and Control of Multi-locomotion Robotic System
    Date & Time: Tuesday, June 14, 2011; 4:00 PM
    Speaker: Tadayoshi Aoyama, Nagoya University
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Abstract
    • First, the concept of "Multi-Locomotion Robot" that has multiple types of locomotion is introduced. The robot is developed to achieve a bipedal walk, a quadruped walk and a brachiation, mimicking locomotion ways of a gorilla. It therefore has higher mobility by selecting a proper locomotion type according to its environment and purpose. I show you some experimental videos with respect to realized motions before now.
      Second, I focus on biped walk and talk about detail of bipedal walking. This part proposes a 3-D biped walking algorithm based on Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC). The robot dynamics is modeled as an autonomous system of a 3-D inverted pendulum by applying the PDAC concept that is based on the assumption of point contact of the robot foot and the virtual constraint as to robot joints. Due to autonomy, there are two conservative quantities named "PDAC constant", that determine the velocity and direction of the biped walking. We also propose the convergence algorithm to make PDAC constants converge to arbitrary values, so that walking velocity and direction are controllable. Finally, experimental results validate the performance and the energy efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
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