- Date: July 26, 2021
MERL Contacts: Petros Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Philip Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - IEEE has announced that the recipients of the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Hervé Bourlard (EPFL/Idiap Research Institute) and Nelson Morgan (ICSI), "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition," and the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing will be Ali Sayed (EPFL), "For contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive signal processing." More details about the contributions of Prof. Bourlard and Prof. Morgan can be found in the announcements by ICSI and EPFL, and those of Prof. Sayed in EPFL's announcement. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) has recently become the new sponsor of these two prestigious awards, and extends our warmest congratulations to all of the 2022 award recipients.
The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing, while the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing was established in 2012 for outstanding contribution to the advancement of signal processing, other than in the areas of speech and audio processing. Both awards have recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields. MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to the signal processing field through its sponsorship of these awards.
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- Date: July 13, 2021
Where: Robotics: Science and Systems
MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh Jha; Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha, and Siddarth Jain together with research groups at MIT, NVIDIA, NIST, TUM, Google DeepMind, ETH Zurich, Google AI, and UMASS Lowell organized a workshop at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2021 conference. The workshop was on "Advancing Artificial Intelligence and Manipulation for Robotics: Understanding Gaps, Industry and Academic Perspectives, and Community Building". The workshop had a list of excellent speakers both from academia and industry. Recording of the talks and of the panel discussion can be found in the link below.
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- Date: July 14, 2021
MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - Mouhacine Benosman co-edits a special issue on Extremum Seeking Control in the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing.
The issue contains some of the newest theoretical developments on continuous-time optimizers, known as extremum seekers, with applications ranging from microalgae cultivation control to heating and ventilation systems optimization.
The special issue is available at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10991115/current
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- Date: July 9, 2021
MERL Contacts: Petros Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Philip Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) has become the new sponsor of two prestigious IEEE Technical Field Awards in Signal Processing, the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, for the years 2022-2031. "MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to signal processing by sponsoring both the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing. These awards celebrate the creativity and innovation in the field that touch many aspects of our lives and drive our society forward" said Dr. Anthony Vetro, VP and Director at MERL.
The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing, while the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing was established in 2012 for outstanding contribution to the advancement of signal processing, other than in the areas of speech and audio processing. Both awards have since recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields.
By underwriting these IEEE Technical Field Awards, MERL continues to make a mark by supporting the advancement of technology that makes lasting changes in the world.
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- Date: July 12, 2021
MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Rien Quirynen
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Rien Quirynen will present work in collaboration with Karl Berntorp on "Uncertainty Propagation by Linear Regression Kalman Filters for Stochastic Nonlinear MPC" as a keynote speaker at the 7th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control 2021 on July, 12th. The paper is 1 out of 5 keynote presentations chosen among more than 50 accepted papers at the conference. An abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date: June 21, 2021
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA).
JOTA is devoted to the publication of carefully selected high quality regular papers, invited papers, survey papers, technical notes, book notices, and forums that cover mathematical optimization techniques, computational methodologies of optimization algorithms and their applications to science, engineering, and business. Typical theoretical areas include linear, nonlinear, discrete, stochastic, and dynamic optimization. Among the areas of application covered are mathematical economics, mathematical physics and biology, all areas of engineering, and novel areas, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing optimization.
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- Date: June 18, 2021
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Rui Ma
Research Areas: Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - During the 2021 International Microwave Symposium Week (June 20-25), Rui Ma will give an invited talk on MERL's recent power amplifiers research at an IMS Technical Workshop to be held on June 21st, titled "From Digital to Intelligent: Advancement of MISO Power Amplifiers by Machine Learning".
IMS is the annual flagship conference of IEEE MTT-S (Microwave Theory and Techniques Society) and the centerpiece of Microwave Week. It is the largest gathering of RF/Microwave professionals in the world and combines multiple technical conferences with the biggest commercial exhibitions for the microwave industry.
Mitsubishi Electric U.S. (MEUS) will also host an online interactive booth to showcase our latest high-frequency Semiconductor & Device products at IMS week.
More detailed information can be found at the Mitsubishi Electric booth.
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- Date: April 23, 2021
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Electric Systems
Brief - IoT applications such as smart metering system are rapidly increasing. A broad range of low power wide area communication technologies have been developed. These systems all operate in frequencies below 1 GHz, commonly called Sub-1 GHz frequency bands, to meet various application requirements. Several communication standards and proprietary technologies already use the Sub-1 GHz bands: IEEE 802.15.4g (Wi-SUN), IEEE 802.11ah (Wi-Fi HaLow), LoRa, SigFox and RFID. Due to limited spectrum in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands, it is likely that applications will compete for the same resources and interfere with one another. This is a particular issue in Japan where the amount of license-exempt Sub-1 GHz frequencies is more limited than in other regulatory regions. Therefore, the coexistence becomes an issue to be addressed. Accordingly, IEEE New Standards Committee and Standard Board formed IEEE 802.19.3 Task Group in 2018 to develop guidelines and best practices for the coexistence of IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 based systems and to guide product deployment. MERL member Jianlin Guo took a lead role as Task Group Technical Editor, and was supported by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation researchers Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi and consultant Benjamin A. Rolfe (Task Group Chair) in the development of this standard. As of April 2021 a new standard recommended practice document, IEEE Recommended Practice for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks—Part 19: Coexistence Methods for IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 Based Systems Operating in the Sub‐1 GHz Frequency Bands, was published. This will help guide future IoT/smart metering system deployment. The standard is widely available for download from the IEEE Standards Association at https://standards.ieee.org/standard/802_19_3-2021.html.
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- Date: April 22, 2021
Where: Houston, Texas
MERL Contact: Karl Berntorp
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics, Signal Processing
Brief - The invited seminar "System Design, Planning, and Control for Autonomous Driving" was part of the Distinguished Seminar series at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, Houston, Tx. The invited lecture described MERL research related to the different system components involved in autonomous driving, with particular focus on motion-planning and predictive-control methods.
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- Date: April 15, 2021
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Rui Ma; Koon Hoo Teo
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
Brief - The cover article in the April issue of Microwave Journal features MERL and MELCO's invited paper entitled "A New Frontier for Power Amplifiers Enabled by Machine Learning". Our recent research applying ML for optimizing operating conditions of advanced power amplifier designs is highlighted.
Since 1958, Microwave Journal has been the leading source for information about RF and Microwave technology, design techniques, news, events and educational information. Microwave Journal reaches 50,000 qualified readers monthly with a print magazine that has a global reach.
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- Date: April 9, 2021
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty, a Research Scientist at MERL's Multiphysical Systems (MS) Team, gave an invited talk on "Learning for Control and Estimation using Digital Twins" at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Seminar Series organized at UIC. The talk proposed new learning-based control/estimation architectures that can utilize simulation data obtained from digital twins to add self-optimization and constraint-enforcement features to grey/black-box control systems.
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- Date: April 7, 2021
Where: Online
MERL Contact: Devesh Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Devesh Jha, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave an invited talk at the robotics seminar series at the University of Leeds. The talk presented some of the recent work done at MERL in the areas of robotic manipulation and robot learning.
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- Date: April 6, 2021
Where: Linköping University, Sweden
MERL Contact: Karl Berntorp
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
Brief - MERL researcher Karl Berntorp was invited to give a lecture in the ELLIIT PhD course "Motion Planning and Control" at the Division of Vehicular Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University. The course is open for Ph.D. students as well as senior undergraduate students, and covers both fundamental algorithms and state-of-the-art methods for motion planning and control. The invited lecture described MERL research on the use of invariant sets for safe motion planning and control, with application to autonomous vehicles.
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- Date: March 14, 2021 - April 20, 2021
Where: IROS
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021).
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- Date: March 7, 2021
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
Brief - Stefano Di Cairano has joined the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (T-IV) as an Associate Editor. The IEEE T-IV publishes peer-reviewed articles in the area of intelligent vehicles in a roadway environment, and in particular in automated vehicles. While primarily led by the IEEE ITS Society, IEEE T-IV is an IEEE multi-society journal.
As Associate Editor Stefano will be responsible for the review process of some of the papers submitted to T-IV and will work with the Editorial Board to monitor the status and continuously strengthen the journal.
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- Date: February 15, 2021
Where: Virtual
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave the invited talk "Reinforcement Learning for Robotics" at the Autonomy Talks organized at ETH, Zurich. In the presentation, some directions to apply Model-based Reinforcement Learning algorithms to real-world applications are presented together with a novel MBRL algorithm called MC-PILCO. The link to the presentation is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYgbgMa4j-s.
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- Date: February 15, 2021
Where: The 2nd International Symposium on AI Electronics
MERL Contact: Chiori Hori
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - Chiori Hori, a Senior Principal Researcher in MERL's Speech and Audio Team, will be a keynote speaker at the 2nd International Symposium on AI Electronics, alongside Alex Acero, Senior Director of Apple Siri, Roberto Cipolla, Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, and Hiroshi Amano, Professor at Nagoya University and winner of the Nobel prize in Physics for his work on blue light-emitting diodes. The symposium, organized by Tohoku University, will be held online on February 15, 2021, 10am-4pm (JST).
Chiori's talk, titled "Human Perspective Scene Understanding via Multimodal Sensing", will present MERL's work towards the development of scene-aware interaction. One important piece of technology that is still missing for human-machine interaction is natural and context-aware interaction, where machines understand their surrounding scene from the human perspective, and they can share their understanding with humans using natural language. To bridge this communications gap, MERL has been working at the intersection of research fields such as spoken dialog, audio-visual understanding, sensor signal understanding, and robotics technologies in order to build a new AI paradigm, called scene-aware interaction, that enables machines to translate their perception and understanding of a scene and respond to it using natural language to interact more effectively with humans. In this talk, the technologies will be surveyed, and an application for future car navigation will be introduced.
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- Date: January 25, 2021
Awarded to: Takenori Sumi, Yukimasa Nagai, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Tatsuya Yokoyama, Hiroshi Mineno
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - MELCO and MERL researchers have won "Excellent Presentation Award" at the IPSJ/CDS30 (Information Processing Society of Japan/Consumer Devices and Systems 30th conferences) held on January 25, 2021. The paper titled "Sub-1 GHz Coexistence Using Reinforcement Learning Based IEEE 802.11ah RAW Scheduling" addresses coexistence between IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g systems in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands. This paper proposes a novel method to allocate IEEE 802.11 RAW time slots using a Q-Learning technique. MERL and MELCO have been leading IEEE 802.19.3 coexistence standard development and this paper is a good candidate for future standard enhancement. The authors are Takenori Sumi, Yukimasa Nagai, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Tatsuya Yokoyama and Hiroshi Mineno.
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- Date: January 6, 2021
Awarded to: Rushil Anirudh, Suhas Lohit, Pavan Turaga
MERL Contact: Suhas Lohit
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - A team of researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Arizona State University (ASU) received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at WACV 2021 for their paper "Generative Patch Priors for Practical Compressive Image Recovery".
The paper proposes a novel model of natural images as a composition of small patches which are obtained from a deep generative network. This is unlike prior approaches where the networks attempt to model image-level distributions and are unable to generalize outside training distributions. The key idea in this paper is that learning patch-level statistics is far easier. As the authors demonstrate, this model can then be used to efficiently solve challenging inverse problems in imaging such as compressive image recovery and inpainting even from very few measurements for diverse natural scenes.
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- Date: December 7, 2020 - December 11, 2020
Where: Taipei, Taiwan
MERL Contacts: Kyeong Jin (K.J.) Kim; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip Orlik; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL researchers have published four papers in 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeComm). This conference is one of the two IEEE Communications Societies flagship conferences dedicated to Communications for Human and Machine Intelligence. Topics of the published papers include, transmit diversity schemes, coding for molecular networks, and location and human activity sensing via WiFi signals.
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- Date: November 16, 2020
MERL Contacts: Devesh Jha; Daniel Nikovski; Diego Romeres; Alan Sullivan; Jeroen van Baar
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researchers, in collaboration with researchers from MELCO and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT, have released simulation software Circular Maze Environment (CME). This system could be used as a new benchmark for evaluating different control and robot learning algorithms. The control objective in this system is to tip and the tilt the maze so as to drive one (or multiple) marble(s) to the innermost ring of the circular maze. Although the system is very intuitive for humans to control, it is very challenging for artificial intelligence agents to learn efficiently. It poses several challenges for both model-based as well as model-free methods, due to its non-smooth dynamics, long planning horizon, and non-linear dynamics. The released Python package provides the simulation environment for the circular maze, where movement of multiple marbles could be simulated simultaneously. The package also provides a trajectory optimization algorithm to design a model-based controller in simulation.
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- Date: October 29, 2020
MERL Contact: Devesh Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - MERL Researcher Devesh Jha has been appointed to the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) as an Associate Editor. IEEE RA-L publishes peer-reviewed articles in the areas of robotics and automation which can also be presented at the annual flagship conferences of RAS like ICRA, IROS and CASE.
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- Date: October 20, 2020
Awarded to: Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Hiroshi Mineno
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Optimization, Signal Processing
Brief - MELCO and MERL researchers have won "Outstanding Presentation Award" at 28th Conference of Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)/Consumer Device & Systems held on September 29-30, 2020. The paper titled "IEEE 802.19.3 Standardization for Coexistence of IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g Systems in Sub-1 GHz Frequency Bands" reports IEEE 802.19.3 standard development on coexistence between IEEE 802.11ah and IEEE 802.15.4g systems in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands. MERL and MELCO have been leading this standard development and made major technical contributions, which propose methods to mitigate interference in smart meter systems. The authors are Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik and Hiroshi Mineno.
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- Date: October 13, 2020
MERL Contact: Siddarth Jain
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Computer vision and robotics researcher, Siddarth Jain, has been appointed to the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) as an Associate Editor. Siddarth joined MERL in September 2019 after obtaining his Ph.D. in robotics from Northwestern University, where he developed novel robotics systems to help people with motor-impairments in performing activities of daily living tasks.
RA-L publishes peer-reviewed articles in areas of robotics and automation. RA-L also provides a unique feature to the authors with the opportunity to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal and present the same paper at the annual flagship robotics conferences of IEEE RAS, including ICRA, IROS, and CASE.
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- Date: October 15, 2020
Awarded to: Ethan Manilow, Gordon Wichern, Jonathan Le Roux
MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - Former MERL intern Ethan Manilow and MERL researchers Gordon Wichern and Jonathan Le Roux won Best Poster Award and Best Video Award at the 2020 International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2020) for the paper "Hierarchical Musical Source Separation". The conference was held October 11-14 in a virtual format. The Best Poster Awards and Best Video Awards were awarded by popular vote among the conference attendees.
The paper proposes a new method for isolating individual sounds in an audio mixture that accounts for the hierarchical relationship between sound sources. Many sounds we are interested in analyzing are hierarchical in nature, e.g., during a music performance, a hi-hat note is one of many such hi-hat notes, which is one of several parts of a drumkit, itself one of many instruments in a band, which might be playing in a bar with other sounds occurring. Inspired by this, the paper re-frames the audio source separation problem as hierarchical, combining similar sounds together at certain levels while separating them at other levels, and shows on a musical instrument separation task that a hierarchical approach outperforms non-hierarchical models while also requiring less training data. The paper, poster, and video can be seen on the paper page on the ISMIR website.
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