- Date: February 5, 2018
Where: National Public Radio (NPR)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL's speech separation technology was featured in NPR's All Things Considered, as part of an episode of All Tech Considered on artificial intelligence, "Can Computers Learn Like Humans?". An example separating the overlapped speech of two of the show's hosts was played on the air.
The technology is based on a proprietary deep learning method called Deep Clustering. It is the world's first technology that separates in real time the simultaneous speech of multiple unknown speakers recorded with a single microphone. It is a key step towards building machines that can interact in noisy environments, in the same way that humans can have meaningful conversations in the presence of many other conversations.
A live demonstration was featured in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation's Annual R&D Open House last year, and was also covered in international media at the time.
(Photo credit: Sam Rowe for NPR)
Link:
"Can Computers Learn Like Humans?" (NPR, All Things Considered)
MERL Deep Clustering Demo.
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- Date: February 1, 2018
MERL Contact: Scott A. Bortoff
Research Area: Control
Brief - Scott A. Bortoff has been selected by the IEEE Control System Society Board of Governors to serve as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, effective January 1, 2018.
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- Date: January 31, 2018
MERL Contact: Chiori Hori
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Chiori Hori has been elected to serve on the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for a 3-year term.
The SLTC promotes and influences all the technical areas of speech and language processing such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken language understanding, speech to speech translation, spoken dialog management, speech indexing, information extraction from audio, and speaker and language recognition.
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- Date: June 2, 2018 - June 4, 2018
Where: Newton, Massachusetts (USA)
Research Areas: Control, Computer Vision, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Data Analytics
Brief - Dr. Andrew Knyazev of MERL has accepted an invitation to participate at the 2018 MathWorks Research Summit. The objective of the Research Summit is to provide a forum for leading researchers in academia and industry to explore the latest research and technology results and directions in computation and its use in technology, engineering, and science. The event aims to foster discussion among scientists, engineers, and research faculty about challenges and research opportunities for the respective communities with a particular interest in exploring cross-disciplinary research avenues.
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- Date: January 1, 2018
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro has been appointed to the Conference Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His term is two years and expires in December 2019. He will also serve as a member of the Conference Board Executive Subcommittee.
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- Date: December 16, 2017 - December 20, 2017
Where: Okinawa, Japan
MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL presented three papers at the 2017 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), which was held in Okinawa, Japan from December 16-20, 2017. ASRU is the premier speech workshop, bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting. More than 270 people attended the event this year, a record number. MERL's Speech and Audio Team was a key part of the organization of the workshop, with John Hershey serving as General Chair, Chiori Hori as Sponsorship Chair, and Jonathan Le Roux as Demonstration Chair. Two of the papers by MERL were selected among the 10 finalists for the best paper award. Mitsubishi Electric and MERL were also Platinum sponsors of the conference, with MERL awarding the MERL Best Student Paper Award.
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- Date: November 27, 2017
MERL Contact: Richard C. (Dick) Waters Brief - A recent report by JLL finds that MERL is among the top 10 organizations in Massachusetts in terms of patent filings in 2010-2015. This is especially notable since MERL is by far the smallest organization in that group.
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- Date: February 15, 2018
Brief - University faculty members are invited to spend part or all of their sabbaticals at MERL, pursuing projects of their own choosing in collaboration with MERL researchers.
To apply, a candidate should identify and contact one or more MERL researchers with whom they would like to collaborate. The applicant and a MERL researcher will jointly prepare a proposal that the researcher will champion internally. Please visit the visiting faculty web page for further details: http://www.merl.com/employment/visiting-faculty.php.
The application deadline for positions starting in Summer/Fall 2018 is February 15, 2018.
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- Date: November 27, 2017
Brief - MERL researcher Mouhacine Benosman has been appointed as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA).
The Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications publishes carefully selected papers covering mathematical optimization techniques and their applications to science and engineering. An applications paper should be as much about the application of an optimization technique as it is about the solution of a particular problem.
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- Date: October 28, 2017
Where: Venice, Italy
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Tim K. Marks will give an invited keynote talk at the 2017 IEEE Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG 2017). The workshop will take place On October 28, 2017, at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2017) in Venice, Italy.
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- Date: October 18, 2017
Where: International Federation of Automatic Control
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL Mechatronics Senior Principal Research Scientist and Senior Optimization-based Control Team Leader, Stefano Di Cairano, was recently appointed the Vice-Chair of IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Technical Committee for Optimal Control. His term will continue through July 2020.
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- Date: September 17, 2017 - September 20, 2017
Where: Beijing, China
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Dehong Liu; Hassan Mansour; Huifang Sun; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Computational Sensing, Digital Video
Brief - MERL presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), which was held in Beijing, China from September 17-20, 2017. ICIP is a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and approximately 1300 people attended the event. Anthony Vetro served as General Co-chair for the conference.
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- Date: October 4, 2017 - October 6, 2017
Where: Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang Brief - Every year, women technologists and the best minds in computing convene to highlight the contributions of women to computing. The Anita Borg Institute co-presents GHC with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
The conference results in collaborative proposals, networking and mentoring for our attendees. Conference presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industry, academia and government.
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- Date: September 17, 2017 - September 21, 2017
Where: 2017 European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC), Sweden
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Two papers from the Optical Communications team were presented at the 2017 European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) held in Gothenburg, Sweden in September 2017. The papers relate to enhanced error correction coding for coherent optical links and advanced precoding for optical data center networks. The invited paper studied irregular polar coding to reduce computational complexity, decoding latency, and bit error rate at the same time. In addition to two papers, the team member was invited to talk about constellation shaping as a workshop panelist.
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- Date: May 24, 2017 - May 26, 2017
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Abraham Goldsmith; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning
Brief - Talks were presented by members of several groups at MERL and covered a wide range of topics:
- Similarity-Based Vehicle-Motion Prediction
- Transfer Operator Based Approach for Optimal Stabilization of Stochastic Systems
- Extended command governors for constraint enforcement in dual stage processing machines
- Cooperative Optimal Output Regulation of Multi-Agent Systems Using Adaptive Dynamic Programming
- Deep Reinforcement Learning for Partial Differential Equation Control
- Indirect Adaptive MPC for Output Tracking of Uncertain Linear Polytopic Systems
- Constraint Satisfaction for Switched Linear Systems with Restricted Dwell-Time
- Path Planning and Integrated Collision Avoidance for Autonomous Vehicles
- Least Squares Dynamics in Newton-Krylov Model Predictive Control
- A Neuro-Adaptive Architecture for Extremum Seeking Control Using Hybrid Learning Dynamics
- Robust POD Model Stabilization for the 3D Boussinesq Equations Based on Lyapunov Theory and Extremum Seeking.
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- Date: May 24, 2017
Where: Tokyo, Japan
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has created the world's first technology that separates in real time the simultaneous speech of multiple unknown speakers recorded with a single microphone. It's a key step towards building machines that can interact in noisy environments, in the same way that humans can have meaningful conversations in the presence of many other conversations. In tests, the simultaneous speeches of two and three people were separated with up to 90 and 80 percent accuracy, respectively. The novel technology, which was realized with Mitsubishi Electric's proprietary "Deep Clustering" method based on artificial intelligence (AI), is expected to contribute to more intelligible voice communications and more accurate automatic speech recognition. A characteristic feature of this approach is its versatility, in the sense that voices can be separated regardless of their language or the gender of the speakers. A live speech separation demonstration that took place on May 24 in Tokyo, Japan, was widely covered by the Japanese media, with reports by three of the main Japanese TV stations and multiple articles in print and online newspapers. The technology is based on recent research by MERL's Speech and Audio team.
Links:
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release
MERL Deep Clustering Demo
Media Coverage:
Fuji TV, News, "Minna no Mirai" (Japanese)
The Nikkei (Japanese)
Nikkei Technology Online (Japanese)
Sankei Biz (Japanese)
EE Times Japan (Japanese)
ITpro (Japanese)
Nikkan Sports (Japanese)
Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun (Japanese)
Dempa Shimbun (Japanese)
Il Sole 24 Ore (Italian)
IEEE Spectrum (English).
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- Date: June 5, 2017
Where: Honolulu, HI
MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL researcher Dr. Rui Ma, is organizing a Workshop in collaboration with Dr. SungWon Chung of the University of Southern California (USC) on advanced digital transmitters. This workshop overviews recent advances in digital-intensive wireless transmitter R&D for both base-stations and mobile devices. The focus will be on the digital signal processing techniques and related digital-intensive transmitter circuits and architectures for advanced modulation, linearization, spur cancellation, high efficiency encoding, and parallel processing. This workshop takes place on Monday, June 5th 2017 at International Microwave Week, in Honolulu, HI. In total, 8 technical presentations from world leading research groups will be given.
Dr. Ma will present a talk titled, "Advanced Power Encoding and Non-Contiguous Multi-Band Digital Transmitter Architectures".
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- Date: May 21, 2017 - May 25, 2017
Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - Five papers from the Wireless Comms team will be presented at ICC2017 to be held in Paris from 21-25 May 2017. The papers relate to channel estimation and adaptive transmission for mmWave, noncoherent MIMO, error correction coding, and video transmission.
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- Date: April 27, 2017
Where: Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim K. Marks presented an invited talk as part of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory CORE Seminar Series on Biometrics. The talk was entitled "Robust Real-Time 2D Face Alignment and 3D Head Pose Estimation."
Abstract: Head pose estimation and facial landmark localization are key technologies, with widespread application areas including biometrics and human-computer interfaces. This talk describes two different robust real-time face-processing methods, each using a different modality of input image. The first part of the talk describes our system for 3D head pose estimation and facial landmark localization using a commodity depth sensor. The method is based on a novel 3D Triangular Surface Patch (TSP) descriptor, which is viewpoint-invariant as well as robust to noise and to variations in the data resolution. This descriptor, combined with fast nearest-neighbor lookup and a joint voting scheme, enable our system to handle arbitrary head pose and significant occlusions. The second part of the talk describes our method for face alignment, which is the localization of a set of facial landmark points in a 2D image or video of a face. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a Mixture of Invariant eXperts (MIX), where each expert learns a regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. We also present a method to include deformation constraints within the discriminative alignment framework, which makes the algorithm more robust. Both our 3D head pose and 2D face alignment methods outperform the previous results on standard datasets. If permitted, I plan to end the talk with a live demonstration.
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- Date: April 10, 2017
Where: University of Utah School of Computing
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim K. Marks presented an invited talk at the University of Utah School of Computing, entitled "Action Detection from Video and Robust Real-Time 2D Face Alignment."
Abstract: The first part of the talk describes our multi-stream bi-directional recurrent neural network for action detection from video. In addition to a two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) on full-frame appearance (images) and motion (optical flow), our system trains two additional streams on appearance and motion that have been cropped to a bounding box from a person tracker. To model long-term temporal dynamics within and between actions, the multi-stream CNN is followed by a bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer. Our method outperforms the previous state of the art on two action detection datasets: the MPII Cooking 2 Dataset, and a new MERL Shopping Dataset that we have made available to the community. The second part of the talk describes our method for face alignment, which is the localization of a set of facial landmark points in a 2D image or video of a face. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a Mixture of Invariant eXperts (MIX), where each expert learns a regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. We also present a method to include deformation constraints within the discriminative alignment framework, which makes the algorithm more robust. Our face alignment system outperforms the previous results on standard datasets. The talk will end with a live demo of our face alignment system.
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- Date: March 19, 2017 - March 23, 2017
Where: Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC)
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Five papers from the Optical Comms team will be presented at OFC2017 to be held in Los Angeles from 19-23 March 2017. The papers relate to 1Tb/s optical transmission, high performance modulation formats and error correction coding for coherent optical links and precoding for plastic optical fiber links.
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- Date: March 5, 2017 - March 9, 2017
Where: New Orleans
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Hassan Mansour; Anthony Vetro; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Computational Sensing, Digital Video, Information Security, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researchers will presented 10 papers at the upcoming IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP), to be held in New Orleans from March 5-9, 2017. Topics to be presented include recent advances in speech recognition and audio processing; graph signal processing; computational imaging; and privacy-preserving data analysis.
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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- Date: January 12, 2017
Where: Tokyo, Japan
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) announced today the development of an ultra-wideband gallium nitride (GaN) Doherty power amplifier for next generation base stations that is compatible with a world-leading range (company estimate) of frequency bands above 3GHz to cover an operating bandwidth of 600MHz. The technology is expected to help reduce the size and energy consumption of next generation wireless base stations.
Please see the link below for the full Mitsubishi Electric press release text.
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- Date: October 11, 2016
Where: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Dr. Rui Ma was invited to give a talk on Modern Topics in Power Amplifier, which was IEEE Chapter course organized by IEEE Boston Section.
This five week lecture series intended to give a tutorial overview of the latest developments in power amplifier technology. It began with a review of RF power amplifier concepts then teaches the modern MMIC design flow process. Efficiency, and linearization techniques were discussed in the following weeks. The course was concluded with a hands on demonstration and exercise.
Dr. Ma was addressing the advancement of Digital Transmitter as a enabling technology for next generation wireless communications.
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- Date: September 8, 2016
Where: Interspeech 2016, San Francisco, CA
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Speech and Audio Team researchers Shinji Watanabe and Jonathan Le Roux presented two tutorials on September 8 at the Interspeech 2016 conference, held in San Francisco, CA. Shinji collaborated with Marc Delcroix (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan) to deliver a three-hour lecture on "Recent Advances in Distant Speech Recognition", drawing upon their experience organizing and participating in six different recent robust speech processing challenges. Jonathan teamed with Emmanuel Vincent (Inria, France) and Hakan Erdogan (Sabanci University, Microsoft Research) to give an in-depth tour of the latest advances in "Learning-based Approaches to Speech Enhancement And Separation". This collaboration stemmed from extensive stays at MERL by Emmanuel and Hakan, Emmanuel as a summer visitor, and Hakan as a MERL visiting research scientist for over a year while on sabbatical.
Both tutorials were sold out, each attracting more than 100 researchers and students in related fields, and received high praise from audience members.
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