- Date: May 28, 2020
Where: Cambridge, MA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) is proud to announce our commitment to the Open COVID Pledge and makes its patents available free of charge for use in efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and minimize the impact of the disease. We are pleased to join other companies around the globe in applying our technology to not only help track and contain the disease, but to also develop solutions that will promote safe and healthy environments for our society going forward.
As a global manufacturer of equipment that touches our daily lives from automotive and transportation equipment to home appliances, elevators and air conditioning systems, Mitsubishi Electric is well positioned to deploy new technical innovations to realize a safer and healthier future. In this context, the researchers at MERL are motivated to develop innovative solutions that will benefit society by leveraging our core research expertise in the areas of simulation and modelling, optimization, control, signal processing and artificial intelligence.
The terms and conditions of MERL’s COVID-19 patent license are effective immediately. We encourage other intellectual property holders to also commit to the pledge to ensure that there are no impediments to stopping this global pandemic. Our parent company Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has committed to a similar Japan-based IP Open Access Declaration Against COVID-19.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 7, 2020; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Christopher Rackauckas, MIT
MERL Host: Christopher R. Laughman
Research Areas: Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Abstract - In the context of science, the well-known adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" might well be "a model is worth a thousand datasets." Scientific models, such as Newtonian physics or biological gene regulatory networks, are human-driven simplifications of complex phenomena that serve as surrogates for the countless experiments that validated the models. Recently, machine learning has been able to overcome the inaccuracies of approximate modeling by directly learning the entire set of nonlinear interactions from data. However, without any predetermined structure from the scientific basis behind the problem, machine learning approaches are flexible but data-expensive, requiring large databases of homogeneous labeled training data. A central challenge is reco nciling data that is at odds with simplified models without requiring "big data". In this talk we discuss a new methodology, universal differential equations (UDEs), which augment scientific models with machine-learnable structures for scientifically-based learning. We show how UDEs can be utilized to discover previously unknown governing equations, accurately extrapolate beyond the original data, and accelerate model simulation, all in a time and data-efficient manner. This advance is coupled with open-source software that allows for training UDEs which incorporate physical constraints, delayed interactions, implicitly-defined events, and intrinsic stochasticity in the model. Our examples show how a diverse set of computationally-difficult modeling issues across scientific disciplines, from automatically discovering biological mechanisms to accelerating climate simulations by 15,000x, can be handled by training UDEs.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 7, 2020; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Prof. Petar Popovski, Aalborg University, Denmark
MERL Host: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Information Security
Abstract 
The wireless landscape evolves towards supporting a large population of connections for humans and machines with very diverse features and requirements. Perhaps the main motivation of 5G wireless systems is its flexibility to support heterogeneous connectivity requirements: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). However, this classification is rather limited and is currently undergoing a revision within the research community. The first part of this talk will discuss how this heterogeneity can be revised and which opportunities it opens with respect to spectrum usage. The second part of the talk will deal with performance guarantees of wireless services and, specifically, ultra-reliable communication and outline the importance of machine learning in that context. The final part of the talk will provide a broader view on the evolution of wireless connectivity, including aspects that are implied by the resistance to the deployment of 5G, but also the new opportunities that can transform the way we build and utilize connected systems.
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- Date: July 7, 2021 - July 14, 2021
Where: Bratislava, Slovakia
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Stefano Di Cairano has been appointed as Vice-Chair for Industry of the International Program Committee of the 7th IFAC Symposium on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, which will be held in Bratislava, Slovakia, in July 2021.
IFAC NMPC is the main symposium focused on model predictive control, theory, methods and applications, includes contributions on control, optimization, and machine learning research, and is held every 3 years.
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- Date: May 4, 2020 - May 8, 2020
Where: Virtual Barcelona
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Chiori Hori; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researchers are presenting 13 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP), which is being held virtually from May 4-8, 2020. Petros Boufounos is also presenting a talk on the Computational Sensing Revolution in Array Processing (video) in ICASSP’s Industry Track, and Siheng Chen is co-organizing and chairing a special session on a Signal-Processing View of Graph Neural Networks.
Topics to be presented include recent advances in speech recognition, audio processing, scene understanding, computational sensing, array processing, and parameter estimation. Videos for all talks are available on MERL's YouTube channel, with corresponding links in the references below.
This year again, MERL is a sponsor of the conference and will be participating in the Student Job Fair; please join us to learn about our internship program and career opportunities.
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. Originally planned to be held in Barcelona, Spain, ICASSP has moved to a fully virtual setting due to the COVID-19 crisis, with free registration for participants not covering a paper.
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- Date: April 29, 2020
Where: N/A
Research Areas: Communications, Optimization, Signal Processing, Information Security
Brief - Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Signal Processing Group, will serve as lead guest editor for the upcoming JSTSP issue on, "Advanced Signal Processing for Local and Private 5G Networks." The issue is also being organized with the help of other researchers and investigators from leading organizations such as Memorial University, Nokia Bell Laboratories, Princeton University, Aalborg University, Jinan University, and South China University of Technology. This special issue aims to capture the latest research activities in local and private 5G networks from the signal processing perspective and is targeted for publication January 2022.
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- Date: December 8, 2020 - December 11, 2020
Where: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Control, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty, a Research Scientist in MERL's Multi-Physical Systems, will be serving as an Associate Editor at the 2020 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
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- Date: March 8, 2020 - March 13, 2020
MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - Due to COVID-19, MERL Optical Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers including 2 invited talks at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2020, that was held in San Diego from March 8-13, 2020. Topics presented include recent advances in quantum signal processing, channel coding design, nano-optic power splitter, and deep learning-based integrated photonics. In addition, Dr. Kojima gave an invited workshop talk on deep learning-based nano-photonic device optimization.
OFC is the largest global conference and exhibition for optical communications and networking professionals. The program is comprehensive from research to marketplace, from components to systems and networks and from technical sessions to the exhibition. For over 40 years, OFC has drawn attendees from all corners of the globe to meet and greet, teach and learn, make connections and move the industry forward. The five-day technical conference features peer reviewed presentations and more than 180 invited speakers, the thought leaders in the industry presenting the highlights of emerging technologies. Additional technical programming throughout the week includes special symposia, special sessions, in-depth tutorials, workshops, panels and the thought-provoking rump session.
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- Date: February 14, 2020
Where: 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, will be serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020).
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- Date: February 10, 2020
Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
Brief - Dr. Benosman has been nominated as an associate editor at the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS).
The L-CSS publishes peer-reviewed brief articles that provide a rapid and concise account of innovative ideas regarding the theory, design, and applications of all aspects of control engineering.
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- Date: January 1, 2020
Where: IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Dr. Keisuke Kojima, Senior Principal Research Staff of MERL and Fellow of The Optical Society of America (OSA), has been appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology.
IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology is a semi-monthly hybrid open-access journal, co-sponsored by seven IEEE technical societies and OSA, has been publishing leading work in optical waveguide technologies and their applications, from integrated photonics to optical networks.
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- Date: May 26, 2020
Where: 2020 SIAM Conference on Optimization, Hong Kong
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, Data Analytics, has been invited to serve on the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization Early Career Prize (SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize) committee. Instituted in 2018, the SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize is awarded every three years to an outstanding early career researcher in the field of optimization for distinguished contributions to the field in the six calendar years prior to the award year. The 2020 SIAG/OPT Early Career Prize will be awarded during the 2020 SIAM Conference on Optimization to be held in Hong Kong.
Arvind Raghunathan will also host a mini-symposium on global optimization titled "Global Optimization of MINLP: Recent Advances". The mini-symposium will feature talks related to theoretical and algorithmic aspects of global optimization.
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- Date: December 18, 2019
Awarded to: Xuankai Chang, Wangyou Zhang, Yanmin Qian, Jonathan Le Roux, Shinji Watanabe
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researcher Jonathan Le Roux and co-authors Xuankai Chang, Shinji Watanabe (Johns Hopkins University), Wangyou Zhang, and Yanmin Qian (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) won the Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2019), for the paper "MIMO-Speech: End-to-End Multi-Channel Multi-Speaker Speech Recognition". MIMO-Speech is a fully neural end-to-end framework that can transcribe the text of multiple speakers speaking simultaneously from multi-channel input. The system is comprised of a monaural masking network, a multi-source neural beamformer, and a multi-output speech recognition model, which are jointly optimized only via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) criterion. The award was received by lead author Xuankai Chang during the conference, which was held in Sentosa, Singapore from December 14-18, 2019.
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- Date: December 12, 2019
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
Brief - Stefano Di Cairano has been appointed inaugural chair of the IEEE CSS Technology Conference Editorial Board. In this role Stefano will coordinate the creation and maintenance of the Editorial Board, and will coordinate the editorial board activities supporting the IEEE CCTA conference series, including manuscript assignment to associate editors, monitoring of the manuscript assessment, and program finalization with the conference program chairs. Stefano will also work with the other IEEE CSS Editorial Board Chairs and IEEE CSS Leadership to ensure the quality and improve the processes of IEEE CSS publications.
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- Date: December 13, 2019
Where: IEEE Brief - Dr. Rui Ma has been appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology (IEEE J-ERM).
IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology, sponsored by IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), Antennas and Propagation Society (APS), Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and Sensor Councils (with 26 IEEE member societies), encourages the submission of manuscripts with scopes in state-of-the-art research related to electromagnetics theory, RF and Microwave techniques and integration for medical and biological applications.
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- Date: December 11, 2019 - December 13, 2019
Where: Nice, France
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the Conference on Decision and Control, MERL presented 8 papers on subjects including estimation for thermal-fluid models and transportation networks, analysis of HVAC systems, extremum seeking for multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning for vehicle platoons, and learning with applications to autonomous vehicles.
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- Date: December 9, 2019 - December 13, 2019
Where: Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Pu (Perry) Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Information Security
Brief - MERL Signal Processing scientists and collaborators will be presenting 11 papers at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2019, which is being held in Waikoloa, Hawaii from December 9-13, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in power amplifier, MIMO algorithms, WiFi sensing, video casting, visible light communications, user authentication, vehicular communications, secrecy, and relay systems, including sophisticated machine learning applications. A number of these papers are a result of successful collaboration between MERL and world-leading Universities including: Osaka University, University of New South Wales, Oxford University, Princeton University, South China University of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aalborg University.
GLOBECOM is one of the IEEE Communications Society’s two flagship conferences dedicated to driving innovation in nearly every aspect of communications. Each year, more than 3000 scientific researchers and their management submit proposals for program sessions to be held at the annual conference. Themed “Revolutionizing Communications,” GLOBECOM2019 will feature a comprehensive high-quality technical program including 13 symposia and a variety of tutorials and workshops to share visions and ideas, obtain updates on latest technologies and expand professional and social networking.
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- Date: November 20, 2019
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave a seminar lecture at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Colloquium of the University of Connecticut. The talk described novel reinforcement algorithms based on combining physical models with non-parametric models of robotic systems derived from data.
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- Date: November 9, 2019
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - Takaaki 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: October 17, 2019
Awarded to: Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs
MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips Brief - MERL received Cultural Vista's Global Partnership Award at the 2019 Cultural Vistas Awards Gala (#CVGala)in NYC in October. This event brought together more than 250 leaders from across the business, education, government, and diplomatic communities for a special evening recognizing leadership in advancing global skills and understanding.
The Global Partnership award recognizes MERL's exemplary contributions to advancing friendship, understanding, and effective collaboration between the United States and Japan.
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- Date: November 8, 2019
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - Anthony Vetro has been appointed for a two-year term as a Senior Area Editor of the new IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing.
This fully open access journal will publish high-quality, peer-reviewed papers covering the enabling technology for the generation, transformation, extraction, and interpretation of information. It comprises the theory, algorithms with associated architectures and implementations, and applications related to processing information contained in many different formats broadly designated as signals.
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- Date: October 27, 2019
Awarded to: Abhinav Kumar, Tim K. Marks, Wenxuan Mou, Chen Feng, Xiaoming Liu
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim Marks, former MERL interns Abhinav Kumar and Wenxuan Mou, and MERL consultants Professor Chen Feng (NYU) and Professor Xiaoming Liu (MSU) received the Best Oral Paper Award at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019 Workshop on Statistical Deep Learning in Computer Vision (SDL-CV) held in Seoul, Korea. Their paper, entitled "UGLLI Face Alignment: Estimating Uncertainty with Gaussian Log-Likelihood Loss," describes a method which, given an image of a face, estimates not only the locations of facial landmarks but also the uncertainty of each landmark location estimate.
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- Date: Thursday, October 24, 2019
Location: Columbia University, New York, NY
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - SANE 2019, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, was held on Thursday October 24, 2019 at Columbia University, in New York City.
It was the 8th edition in the SANE series of workshops, which started in 2012 and has been held every year alternately in Boston and New York. Since the first edition, the audience has steadily grown, with a previous record of 180 participants in 2017 and 2018, and a new record of 200 participants and 45 posters in 2019.
This year's SANE conveniently took place in conjunction both with the WASPAA workshop, held October 20-23 in upstate New York, and with the DCASE workshop, held October 25-26 in Brooklyn, NY, for a full week of speech and audio enlightenment and delight.
SANE 2019 featured invited talks by seven leading researchers from the Northeast as well as from the international community: Brian Kingsbury (IBM TJ Watson Research Center), Kristen Grauman (University of Texas at Austin, Facebook AI Research), Simon Doclo (University of Oldenburg), Karen Livescu (TTI-Chicago), Gabriel Synnaeve (Facebook AI Research), Hirokazu Kameoka (NTT Communication Science Laboratories), Ron Weiss (Google Brain). It also featured live demonstrations by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL) and Andrew Titus (Apple), and a lively poster session with 45 posters in Columbia University's Low Memorial Library, a National Historic Landmark.
SANE 2019 was co-organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Nima Mesgarani (Columbia), John R. Hershey (Google), Shinji Watanabe (Johns Hopkins), and Steven J. Rennie (Pryon Inc.). SANE remained a free event thanks to generous sponsorship by Columbia University, MERL, Google, Apple, and Amazon.
Slides and videos of the talks are available from the SANE workshop website.
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- Date: October 10, 2019
Awarded to: Devesh Jha, Nurali Virani, Zhenyuan Yuan, Ishana Shekhawat and Asok Ray
MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researcher Devesh Jha has won the Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award 2019 for the paper entitled "Imitation of Demonstrations Using Bayesian Filtering With Nonparametric Data-Driven Models". This paper, published in a Special Commemorative Issue for Rudolf E. Kalman in the ASME JDSMC in March 2018, uses Bayesian filtering for imitation learning in Hidden Mode Hybrid Systems. This award is given annually by the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME to the authors of the best paper published in the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems Measurement and Control during the preceding year.
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- Date: October 1, 2019 - October 4, 2019
MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips Brief - MERL and parent company, Mitsubishi Electric were proud sponsors of the Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando. We had the great pleasure to meet many talented women who exuded passion for technology. With over 25,000+ attendees, the energy was electric and contagious.
MERL recognizes diversity and inclusion not only as an important priority, but a game changer in the industry. We left #GHC2019 feeling inspired to continuously encourage women in tech and to remind them-they are already changing the world.
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