News & Events

73 MERL Events found.



Learn about the MERL Seminar Series.



  •  EVENT    Prof. Yuejie Chi of Carnegie Mellon University to Deliver Keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Wednesday, November 15, 2023; 3:00-3:40pm (EST)
    Location: Virtual Event
    Speaker: Prof. Yuejie Chi, Carnegie Mellon University
    MERL Contact: Bingnan Wang
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the featured keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2023: Prof. Yuejie Chi from Carnegie Mellon University.

      Our virtual open house this year will take place on November 15, 2023, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST). Prof. Chi’s talk is scheduled for 3:00-3:40pm (EST). For details and agenda of the event, please visit: https://merl.com/events/voh23

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship, post-doc, and full-time employment opportunities. To register, go to: https://mailchi.mp/merl/voh23


      Title: Sample Complexity of Q-learning: from Single-agent to Federated Learning

      Abstract: Q-learning, which seeks to learn the optimal Q-function of a Markov decision process (MDP) in a model-free fashion, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning practices. However, theoretical understandings on its non-asymptotic sample complexity remain unsatisfactory, despite significant recent efforts. In this talk, we first show a tight sample complexity bound of Q-learning in the single-agent setting, together with a matching lower bound to establish its minimax sub-optimality. We then show how federated versions of Q-learning allow collaborative learning using data collected by multiple agents without central sharing, where an importance averaging scheme is introduced to unveil the blessing of heterogeneity.
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  •  EVENT    MERL's Virtual Open House 2023
    Date & Time: Wednesday, November 15, 2023; 1:00 - 5:30 EST
    Location: Virtual Event
    MERL Contact: Bingnan Wang
    Brief
    • Join us for MERL's Virtual Open House (VOH) 2023 on November 15th. Live sessions will be held from 1:00-5:30pm EST, including an overview of recent activities by our research groups, a featured guest speaker and live interaction with our research staff through the Gather platform. Registered attendees will be able to browse our virtual booths at their convenience and connect with our research staff to learn about engagement opportunities, including internship/post-doc openings as well as visiting faculty positions.

      For agenda and details of the event: https://www.merl.com/events/voh23

      To register for the VOH, go to:
      https://mailchi.mp/merl/voh23
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  •  EVENT    MERL's Annual Women in Science Luncheon
    Date: Friday, August 4, 2023
    Location: MERL's Offices, 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
    Speaker: Carole-Jean Wu, PhD, Meta AI / Fair
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL hosted its annual Women in Science luncheon. Carole-Jean Wu, PhD, joined our event to lead a talk on Scaling AI Computing Sustainably. She shared key challenges across the many dimensions of AI, on what and how at-scale optimization can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of AI and computing. Dr. Wu is a Research Scientist and Technical Lead Manager at Meta AI / FAIR. Prior to Meta/Facebook, she was an Associate Professor at ASU.

      As part of this celebration, MERL will be making a donation to Science Club for Girls in Cambridge, MA.

      Science Club for Girls' mission is to foster excitement, confidence, and literacy in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for girls and gender-expansive youth from underrepresented communities by providing free, experiential programs and by maximizing meaningful interactions with women-in-STEM mentors.

      https://www.scienceclubforgirls.org
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  •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2023
    Date: Sunday, June 4, 2023 - Saturday, June 10, 2023
    Location: Rhodes Island, Greece
    MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Suhas Lohit; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Joshua Rapp; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2023, which is being held in Rhodes Island, Greece from June 4-10, 2023.

      Organization

      Petros Boufounos is serving as General Co-Chair of the conference this year, where he has been involved in all aspects of conference planning and execution.

      Perry Wang is the organizer of a special session on Radar-Assisted Perception (RAP), which will be held on Wednesday, June 7. The session will feature talks on signal processing and deep learning for radar perception, pose estimation, and mutual interference mitigation with speakers from both academia (Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Tech, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and industry (Mitsubishi Electric, Bosch, Waveye).

      Anthony Vetro is the co-organizer of the Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS), which will be held on Monday, June 5, and feature invited talks from leaders in both academia and industry on timely topics related to autonomous systems.

      Sponsorship

      MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, June 8. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

      MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Rabab Ward, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Alexander Waibel, the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

      Technical Program

      MERL is presenting 13 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation and speech enhancement, radar imaging, depth estimation, motor fault detection, time series recovery, and point clouds. One workshop paper has also been accepted for presentation on self-supervised music source separation.

      Perry Wang has been invited to give a keynote talk on Wi-Fi sensing and related standards activities at the Workshop on Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC), which will be held on Sunday, June 4.

      Additionally, Anthony Vetro will present a Perspective Talk on Physics-Grounded Machine Learning, which is scheduled for Thursday, June 8.

      About ICASSP

      ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event attracts more than 2000 participants each year.
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  •  EVENT    Prof. Paris Smaragdis of UIUC to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Monday, December 12, 2022; 1:00pm - 5:30pm
    Location: MERL, Virtual
    Speaker: Prof. Paris Smaragdis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the featured keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2022:
      Prof. Paris Smaragdis from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

      Our virtual open house will take place on December 12, 2022, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Smaragdis' talk is scheduled for 3:15pm - 3:45pm (EST).

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/voh2022

      Keynote Title: Dragging Audio Processing Past the 1970s (and the 2010s!)
      Abstract: Audio processing has not changed appreciably in the last 50 years. However, novel tasks, new computational demands, attention to human-centered evaluation, and a strong influence from machine learning, all point towards new ways of thinking about sound. In this talk I will go over multiple examples of how one can modernize standard audio processing in order to serve ambitious project goals. I will specifically talk about the use of meta learning for adaptive filtering, and how we can outperform humans in the game of optimizer design; I will show new ways to represent and process time series based on graph networks that results in highly desirable scaling properties for audio and speech recognition; and I will also talk about how we can move towards unsupervised learning from real-world data in a way that (almost) matches curated data performance and allows highly-distributed learning from audio devices in the wild.

      Speaker Bio:
      Paris Smaragdis is a Professor and an Associate Department Head in the Computer Science department in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completer his graduate studies and postdoc at MIT in 2001. He has been a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge MA, a senior research scientist at Adobe Research, and an Amazon Scholar with AWS. His research lies in the intersection of signal processing and machine learning, where he has contributed multiple widely used methods for source separation and audio analysis throughout his 150+ publications and 60+ US and international patents. His research has been productized many times worldwide, has been widely used in personal computers and commercial systems, and has been used in award winning movies and music releases. He was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the "world's top innovators under 35 years old" in 2006 (TR35 award) and he has received the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award twice (2017,2020). He was elected an IEEE Fellow (class of 2015), and selected as an IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2016-2017). Within IEEE SPS he has served as the chair the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee, the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee, and the Data Science Initiative. He has been elected to and served in the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors, and is currently the Editor in Chief of the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.
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  •  EVENT    MERL's Virtual Open House 2022
    Date & Time: Monday, December 12, 2022; 1:00pm-5:30pm ET
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)/Virtual
    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, Digital Video
    Brief
    • Join MERL's virtual open house on December 12th, 2022! Featuring a keynote, live sessions, research area booths, and opportunities to interact with our research team. Discover who we are and what we do, and learn about internship and employment opportunities.
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2022 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date: Thursday, October 6, 2022
    Location: Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2022, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, was held on Thursday October 6, 2022 in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

      It was the 9th edition in the SANE series of workshops, which started in 2012 and was held every year alternately in Boston and New York until 2019. Since the first edition, the audience has grown to a record 200 participants and 45 posters in 2019. After a 2-year hiatus due to the pandemic, SANE returned with an in-person gathering of 140 students and researchers.

      SANE 2022 featured invited talks by seven leading researchers from the Northeast: Rupal Patel (Northeastern/VocaliD), Wei-Ning Hsu (Meta FAIR), Scott Wisdom (Google), Tara Sainath (Google), Shinji Watanabe (CMU), Anoop Cherian (MERL), and Chuang Gan (UMass Amherst/MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab). It also featured a lively poster session with 29 posters.

      SANE 2022 was co-organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Arnab Ghoshal (Apple), John Hershey (Google), and Shinji Watanabe (CMU). SANE remained a free event thanks to generous sponsorship by Bose, Google, MERL, and Microsoft.

      Slides and videos of the talks will be released on the SANE workshop website.
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  •  EVENT    Sonja Glavaski-Radovanovic presents at MERL's Annual Women In Science Event
    Date: Monday, August 8, 2022
    Location: MERL
    MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips
    Brief
    • On August 8th MERL hosted its annual Women in Science event-in person. Our guest speaker Sonja Galvaski-Radovanovic, Chief Energy Digitalization Scientist and Principal Technology Strategy advisor for the Energy & Environment Directorate at PNNL, shared career wisdom and led a lively, interactive discussion with MERL staff and interns about the significant contributions women have made to the scientific society.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Celebrates 30th Anniversary
    Date: Wednesday, June 15, 2022
    Location: Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro; Richard C. (Dick) Waters
    Brief
    • On June 15th MERL celebrated 30 years of inspiration, imagination and innovation in Cambridge Massachusetts. We invite you to visit our website to learn more about our history, read a booklet describing our achievements during the last three decades, and watch a brief video highlighting some of the impacts we have had.
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  •  EVENT    Prof. Melanie Zeilinger of ETH to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
    Location: Virtual Event
    Speaker: Prof. Melanie Zeilinger, ETH
    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, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the second keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
      Prof. Melanie Zeilinger from ETH .

      Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Zeilinger's talk is scheduled for 3:15pm - 3:45pm (EST).

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

      Keynote Title: Control Meets Learning - On Performance, Safety and User Interaction

      Abstract: With increasing sensing and communication capabilities, physical systems today are becoming one of the largest generators of data, making learning a central component of autonomous control systems. While this paradigm shift offers tremendous opportunities to address new levels of system complexity, variability and user interaction, it also raises fundamental questions of learning in a closed-loop dynamical control system. In this talk, I will present some of our recent results showing how even safety-critical systems can leverage the potential of data. I will first briefly present concepts for using learning for automatic controller design and for a new safety framework that can equip any learning-based controller with safety guarantees. The second part will then discuss how expert and user information can be utilized to optimize system performance, where I will particularly highlight an approach developed together with MERL for personalizing the motion planning in autonomous driving to the individual driving style of a passenger.
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  •  EVENT    Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan of Rice University to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
    Location: Virtual Event
    Speaker: Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan, Rice University
    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, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
      Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan from Rice University.

      Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Veeraraghavan's talk is scheduled for 1:15pm - 1:45pm (EST).

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

      Keynote Title: Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses.

      Abstract: The lens has long been a central element of cameras, since its early use in the mid-nineteenth century by Niepce, Talbot, and Daguerre. The role of the lens, from the Daguerrotype to modern digital cameras, is to refract light to achieve a one-to-one mapping between a point in the scene and a point on the sensor. This effect enables the sensor to compute a particular two-dimensional (2D) integral of the incident 4D light-field. We propose a radical departure from this practice and the many limitations it imposes. In the talk we focus on two inter-related research projects that attempt to go beyond lens-based imaging.

      First, we discuss our lab’s recent efforts to build flat, extremely thin imaging devices by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude mask and computational reconstruction algorithms. These lensless cameras, called FlatCams can be less than a millimeter in thickness and enable applications where size, weight, thickness or cost are the driving factors. Second, we discuss high-resolution, long-distance imaging using Fourier Ptychography, where the need for a large aperture aberration corrected lens is replaced by a camera array and associated phase retrieval algorithms resulting again in order of magnitude reductions in size, weight and cost. Finally, I will spend a few minutes discussing how the wholistic computational imaging approach can be used to create ultra-high-resolution wavefront sensors.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Virtual Open House 2021
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 100pm-5:30pm (EST)
    Location: Virtual Event
    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, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories cordially invites you to join our Virtual Open House, on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      The event will feature keynotes, live sessions, research area booths, and time for open interactions with our researchers. Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities.

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021
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  •  EVENT    MERL Virtual Open House 2020
    Date & Time: Wednesday, December 9, 2020; 1:00-5:00PM EST
    Location: Virtual
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; 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
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  •  EVENT    MERL Hosts Annual Women in Science Luncheon
    Date & Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2019; 12:00PM
    Location: 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
    Speaker: Beverly Shultz
    MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips
    Brief
    • MERL hosted its annual "Women In Science Luncheon" to celebrate and inspire the Lab's team of female researchers, PhD student interns and members of the HQ staff. Beverly Shultz, author of "Skip the Typing Test, I’ll Manage the Software-A Woman’s Pioneering Journey in High Tech” joined the event to share her insights as a successful female engineer, who brought passion and technology business acumen to the male-dominated computer revolution.

      Beverly was a former Vice President of Engineering at Mitsubishi Electric of America and responsible to produce several versions of an early volume rendering product. She was the first female recipient of the MELCO’s President’s Award for Technology, for this work.
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  •  EVENT    MERL is a Proud Sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration 2018!
    Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - Friday, September 28, 2018
    Location: Houston, Texas
    MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Elizabeth Phillips
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • "MERL, in partnership with Mitsubishi Electric was a Gold Sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration 2018 (GHC18) held in Houston, TX on September 26-28th. Presented by AnitaB.org and the Association for Computing Machinery, this is world's largest gathering of women technologists. Chiori Hori and Elizabeth Phillips from MERL, and Yoshiyuki Umei, Jared Baker and Lien Randle from MEUS, proudly represented Mitsubishi Electric at the recruiting expo, that drew over 20,000 female technologists this year.
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  •  EVENT    Dr. Petros Boufounos is co-organizing workshop on the Intersection of Information Theory and Signal Processing
    Date: Sunday, October 28, 2018 - Friday, November 2, 2018
    Location: Banff International Research Station (BIRS), Alberta, Canada
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Dr. Petros Boufounos, Prof. Stark Draper (U. of Toronto) and Prof. Yonina Eldar (Technion) are co-organizing a workshop on the intersection of Information Theory and Signal Processing. The 5-day workshop will take place Oct. 28 - Nov. 2 at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) in Alberta, Canada. The workshop schedule includes invited talks from prominent researchers in the two fields, coming together from all over the world. Parts of the workshop will be streamed live through the BIRS website.
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  •  EVENT    MERL 3rd Annual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, November 29, 2018; 4-6pm
    Location: 201 Broadway, 8th floor, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; 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
    • Snacks, demos, science: On Thursday 11/29, 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 4-6pm and will feature demos & short presentations in our main areas of research including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, speech processing, optimization, machine learning, data analytics, signal processing, communications, sensing, control and dynamical systems, as well as multi-physyical modeling and electronic devices. 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:
      merlopenhouse.eventbrite.com

      Current internship and employment openings:
      www.merl.com/internship/openings
      www.merl.com/employment/employment

      Information about working at MERL:
      www.merl.com/employment.
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  •  EVENT    MERL hosts Workshops for 2018 American Modelica Conference
    Date & Time: Monday, October 8, 2018 - Thursday, October 11, 2018; 8am-5pm
    Location: MIT Samberg Conference Center, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contact: Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Areas: Control, Multi-Physical Modeling
    Brief
    • The 2018 American Modelica Conference, the first North American conference focused on the Modelica multiphysics modeling language, will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 9-10, 2018 at the Samberg Conference Center at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Chris Laughman, a team leader in the Multiphysical Systems and Devices group, is the local chair for the conference.

      This conference will feature over 40 papers and user presentations on the Modelica language and its application to a wide variety of problem domains, including thermofluid, aerospace, automotive, and energy systems. There will also be 2 keynote addresses by John McKibben (Proctor & Gamble) and Hilding Elmqvist (Mogram AB). Nearly 100 attendees from 11 different countries have already registered for the conference, and it promises to be a very educational experience.

      MERL is also hosting two free workshops on October 8 to provide opportunities to engineers looking to increase their familiarity with the language and its applications. An introductory workshop will be led by engineers from Modelon during that morning, and then a second workshop on the application of Modelica to building systems will be led by Michael Wetter from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in the afternoon. MERL will also host a Modelica user meeting on October 11 that will provide more details and discussion about trends in the use and development of Modelica in the larger engineering community.
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2018 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date: Thursday, October 18, 2018
    Location: Google, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2018, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 18, 2018 at Google, in Cambridge, MA. MERL is one of the organizers and sponsors of the workshop.

      It is the 7th edition in the SANE series of workshops, which started at MERL in 2012. Since the first edition, the audience has steadily grown, with a record 180 participants in 2017.

      SANE 2018 will feature invited talks by leading researchers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community. It will also feature a lively poster session, open to both students and researchers.
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  •  EVENT    Fourth Annual Celebrating "Women in Science" Luncheon
    Date: Thursday, July 19, 2018
    Location: MERL
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • We hosted the 4th Annual "Women in Science at MERL," event on July 19th. This year we celebrated the contributions of the eleven female interns, three female researchers, and some female members of HQ staff. MERL executives, managers and researchers participated in the event. MERL's interns and researchers were asked probing questions about how they are fulfilled in their work and how they facilitate innovation. This resulted in every participant feeling as though they were moving their field of science forward. Everyone left feeling inspired.
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  •  EVENT    MERL leads organization of dialog technology challenges and associated workshop
    Date: Sunday, December 10, 2017
    Location: Hyatt Regency, Long Beach, CA
    MERL Contact: Chiori Hori
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Chiori Hori led the organization of the 6th edition of the Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC6). This year's edition of DSTC is split into three tracks: End-to-End Goal Oriented Dialog Learning, End-to-End Conversation Modeling, and Dialogue Breakdown Detection. A total of 23 teams from all over the world competed in the various tracks, and will meet at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach, CA, USA on December 10 to present their results at a dedicated workshop colocated with NIPS 2017.

      MERL's Speech and Audio Team and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation jointly submitted a set of systems to the End-to-End Conversation Modeling Track, obtaining the best rank among 19 submissions in terms of objective metrics.
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  •  EVENT    MERL's Petros Boufounos is co-organizing symposium on The Future Of Signal Processing
    Date & Time: Monday, October 23, 2017; 8:00am-4:00pm
    Location: MIT Samberg Conference Center Floor 7, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Communications, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Dr. Petros Boufounos is co-organizing the symposium on "The Future of Signal Processing," held in honor of the 80th birthday of Prof. Alan V. Oppenheim.

      Details at: https://futureofsp.eecs.mit.edu

      Organizing committee:
      Dr. Tom Baran, Lumii
      Dr. Petros Boufounos, MERL
      Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT
      Prof. Yonina Eldar, Technion

      Program:
      8:00-8:45 Coffee
      8:45-9:00 Opening remarks
      Prof. Martin Schmidt, Provost, MIT
      9:00-9:35 The ever-expanding physical boundaries of Signal Processing
      Prof. Martin Vetterli, President of EPFL, Lausanne
      9:35-10:10 Signal Processors and the U.S. Navy: Enduring Partners
      Admiral John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy

      10:10-10:30 Short break

      10:30-11:05 Signals and Signal Processing: The Invisibles and The Everlastings
      Prof. Min Wu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland
      11:05-11:40 Signal processing with quantum computers
      Prof. Isaac Chuang, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering; Senior Associate Dean of Digital Learning, MIT

      11:40-12:30 A box lunch will be provided. In your lunchbox, you'll find an envelope with four cards in it. Bring these cards back to your seats promptly after lunch for a magical surprise!

      12:30-12:40 Your Role in the Future of Signal Processing
      Magician Joel Acevedo

      12:40-1:05 Future of Low-power Embedded Signal Processing
      Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan, Dean, School of Engineering, MIT
      1:05-1:30 Synthetic biology and signal processing in living cells
      Prof. Ron Weiss, MIT, Professor of Biological Engineering and Director of the Synthetic Biology Center
      1:30-1:55 Physics 101 for Data Scientists
      Prof. Richard Baraniuk, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, Founder and Director of OpenStax College

      1:55-2:15 Short break

      2:15-2:40 Signals: Representation and Information
      Prof. Meir Feder, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University

      2:40-3:05 Exposing and Removing Information: Some new Mathematics for Signal Processing
      Dr. Petros Boufounos, Senior Principal Research Scientist, Sensing Team Leader, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs

      3:05-4:00 Panel discussion: The Venn diagram between "Data Science," "Machine Learning" and "Signal Processing"
      Moderator:
      Prof. Alan Oppenheim, Ford Professor of Engineering, MIT
      Panelists:
      Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, Associate Department Head, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
      Prof. Ron Schafer, Georgia Tech (Emeritus) and Stanford Univ.
      Prof. Yonina Eldar, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Technion
      Prof. Victor Zue, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, MIT
      Prof. Alexander Rakhlin, Associate Professor of Statistics, University of Pennsylvania
      4:00 Closing remarks.
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  •  EVENT    MERL 2nd Annual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, November 30, 2017; 4-6pm
    Location: 201 Broadway, 8th floor, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Snacks, demos, science: On Thursday 11/30, 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 4-6pm 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://merlopenhouse2.eventbrite.com/

      Current internship and employment openings:
      http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
      http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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  •  EVENT    Tim Marks to give lunch talk at Face and Gesture 2017 conference
    Date: Thursday, June 1, 2017
    Location: IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2017), Washington, DC
    Speaker: Tim K. Marks
    MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Tim K. Marks will give the invited lunch talk on Thursday, June 1, at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2017). The talk is entitled "Robust Real-Time 3D Head Pose and 2D Face Alignment.".
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  •  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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