News & Events

1,219 News items found.


  •  NEWS    IEEE Control Systems Magazine interviews Stefano Di Cairano
    Date: April 15, 2019
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • Stefano Di Cairano, senior team leader and distinguished research scientist in the Control and Dynamical Systems group, was interviewed in the April 2019 issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine. Stefano described himself, promising opportunities in the control field, and how his passion for control research fits well into the industrial research laboratory setting at MERL. It is very good reading for any young researcher considering possible career trajectories.
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  •  NEWS    Stefano Di Cairano to give invited address at 3rd IAVSD Workshop on Dynamics of Road Vehicles: Connected and Automated Vehicles
    Date: April 28, 2019
    Where: 3rd IAVSD Workshop on Dynamics of Road Vehicles: Connected and Automated Vehicles
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Areas: Control, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Stefano Di Cairano, Distinguished Scientist and Senior Team Leader in the Control and Dynamical Systems Group, will give an invited talk entitled: "Modularity, integration and synergy in architectures for autonomous driving" that covers recent work in the lab concerning building a modular, robust control framework for autonomous driving.
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  •  NEWS    IEEE-NH ComSig lecture by MERL's Petros Boufounos
    Date: April 4, 2019
    Where: Nashua Public Library, Nashua, NH
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL's Petros Boufounos gave a lecture for the IEEE-NH ComSig chapter at the Nashua Public Library as part of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer series.

      Title: "An Inverse Problem Framework for Array Processing Systems."

      Abstract: Array-based sensing systems, such as ultrasonic, radar and optical (LIDAR) are becoming increasingly important in a variety of applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, medical imaging, and virtual reality, among others. This has led to continuous improvements in sensing hardware, but also to increasing demand for theory and methods to inform the system design and improve the processing. In this talk we will discuss how recent advances in formulating and solving inverse problems, such as compressed sensing, blind deconvolution, and sparse signal modeling can be applied to significantly reduce the cost and improve the capabilities of array-based and multichannel sensing systems. We show that these systems share a common mathematical framework, which allows us to describe both the acquisition hardware and the scene being acquired. Under this framework we can exploit prior knowledge on the scene, the system, and a variety of errors that might occur, allowing for significant improvements in the reconstruction accuracy. Furthermore, we can consider the design of the system itself in the context of the inverse problem, leading to designs that are more efficient, more accurate, or less expensive, depending on the application. In the talk we will explore applications of this model to LIDAR and depth sensing, radar and distributed radar, and ultrasonic sensing. In the context of these applications, we will describe how different models can lead to improved specifications in ultrasonic systems, robustness to position and timing errors in distributed array systems, and cost reduction and new capabilities in LIDAR systems.
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  •  NEWS    MERL presenting 16 papers at ICASSP 2019
    Date: May 12, 2019 - May 17, 2019
    Where: Brighton, UK
    MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Hassan Mansour; Tim K. Marks; 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 will be presenting 16 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP), which is being held in Brighton, UK from May 12-17, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in speech recognition, audio processing, scene understanding, computational sensing, and parameter estimation. MERL is also a sponsor of the conference and will be participating in the student career luncheon; please join us at the lunch 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.
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  •  NEWS    Deep Learning-Based Photonic Circuit Design in Scientific Reports
    Date: February 4, 2019
    Where: Scientific Reports, open-access journal from Nature Research
    MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Chungwei Lin; Kieran Parsons; Bingnan Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • MERL researchers developed a novel design method enhanced by modern deep learning techniques for optimizing photonic integrated circuits (PIC). The developed technique employs residual deep neural networks (DNNs) to understand physics underlaying complicated lightwave propagations through nano-structured photonic devices. It was demonstrated that the trained DNN achieves excellent prediction to design power splitting nanostructures having various target power ratios. The work was published in Scientific Reports, which is an online open access journal from Nature Research, having high-impact articles in the research community.
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  •  NEWS    Anthony Vetro delivers keynote on edge intelligence at IEEE conference on AI circuits and systems
    Date: March 20, 2019
    Where: Hsinchu, Taiwan
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Area: Artificial Intelligence
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS), which was held in Hsinchu, Taiwan from March 18-20, 2019. The talk focused on edge intelligence for optimized systems and high-performance devices.

      Abstract: The combination of IoT sensing, edge computing and AI algorithms is creating new opportunities to use real-time data to optimize system capabilities and increase device performance. In the manufacturing domain, edge intelligence allows us to realize various forms of anomaly detection, predict the lifetime or maintenance schedule of components, and adaptive learn improved control policies. Connected cars will benefit from edge intelligence to improve safety and optimize traffic flows. Additionally, the parameters of a circuit can be automatically tuned using data-driven machine learning techniques to increase efficiency and performance. This presentation highlights the numerous benefits of the edge intelligence framework, and identifies several open challenges and issues.
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  •  NEWS    MERL presenting 4 papers at OFC, including an invited talk
    Date: March 3, 2019 - March 7, 2019
    Where: San Diego, CA
    MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Chungwei Lin; Kieran Parsons; Bingnan Wang; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Optimization, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL researchers are presenting 4 papers at the OSA Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), which is being held in San Diego from March 3-7, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in nonbinary polar codes, joint polar-coded shaping, and deep learning-based photonics circuit design. Additionally, recent work on multiset-partition distribution matching is presented as an invited talk.

      OFC is the flagship conference of the OSA, and the world's most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in optics and photonics. The event attracts more than 10000 participants each year.
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  •  NEWS    MERL's seamless speech recognition technology featured in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation press release
    Date: February 13, 2019
    Where: Tokyo, Japan
    MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
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  •  NEWS    Uros Kalabic spoke on reference governors at the MSU Mechanical Engineering Seminar
    Date: February 12, 2019
    Where: Michigan State University
    MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Stefano Di Cairano; Abraham Goldsmith
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • Uros Kalabic, of MERL's Control and Dynamical Systems group, gave a talk at the Michigan State University Mechanical Engineering Seminar. The talk, entitled "Reference governors: Industrial applications and theoretical advances," covered some of the exciting research being done at MERL on reference governors and briefly described MERL's other research areas. The abstract of the talk can be found via the link below.
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  •  NEWS    Mouhacine Benosman co-edited a special issue on Learning-based Adaptive Control: Theory and Applications
    Date: February 4, 2019
    MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
    Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • Mouhacine Benosman is a guest editor of a special issue on Learning-based Adaptive Control: Theory and Application, recently published by the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing. Other guest editors included Professor F.L. Lewis (University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute), Professor M. Guay (Queen's University), and Professor D. Owens (The University of Sheffield).

      The special issue presents results of current research on learning-based adaptive methods, merging together model-based and data-driven machine learning approaches.

      More information on the content of this special issue can be found at:
      https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10991115/2019/33/2.
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  •  NEWS    Turbulent flow paper selected as "Editors Suggestion" in journal Physical Review Fluids
    Date: January 11, 2019
    Where: PHYSICAL REVIEW FLUIDS, 4, 013801 – Published 11 January 2019
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • The journal Physical Review Fluids has recently instituted "...a service to our readers, we are formally marking a small number of papers published in Physical Review Fluids that the editors and referees find of particular interest, importance, or clarity." The following paper with MERL authors Saleh Nabi and Piyush Grover was so honored in the January 2019 issue: "Reduced-order modeling of fully turbulent buoyancy-driven flows using the Green's function method.".
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  •  NEWS    Mouhacine Benosman to speak at the Aerospace Engineering Department of Worcester Polytechnic Institute
    Date: February 1, 2019
    Where: WPI
    MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • Mouhacine Benosman has been invited to give a talk at the Aerospace Engineering Department of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) on Lyapunov-based model reduction and stabilization of PDEs, with application to the Boussinesq equation. Further details of the talk can be found in the below link.
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  •  NEWS    Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and MERL Press Release Describes Future Digitally Controlled Power Amplifier
    Date: January 10, 2019
    Where: Tokyo, Japan
    MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Philip V. Orlik; Koon Hoo Teo
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced today its development of the world's first ultra-wideband digitally controlled gallium nitride (GaN) amplifier, which is compatible with a world-leading range of sub-6GHz bands focused on fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems. With a power efficiency rating of above 40%, the amplifier is expected to contribute to large-capacity communication and reduce the power consumption of mobile base stations.

      MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers collaborated to develop digital control methods for amplifiers achieving high-efficiency of 40% and above, with 110% of the fractional bandwidth over frequency range 1.4-4.8 GHz. The digital control signals are designed using a learning-function based on Maisart®.

      Please see the link below for the full Mitsubishi Electric press release text.
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  •  NEWS    Petros Boufounos is appointed 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer
    Date: December 12, 2018
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL's Petros Boufounos has been appointed as a member of the 2019 class of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Class of Distinguished Lecturers for the term of 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020.

      The IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (DL) Program provides a means for Chapters to have access to well-known educators and authors in the fields of signal processing to lecture at Chapter meetings. Each year, five DLs are appointed by the society. In addition to Dr. Boufounos, his year's class includes Israel Cohen (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), Janusz Konrad (Boston University), Anna Scaglione (Arizona State University), and Rui Zhang (National University of Singapore).
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  •  NEWS    MERL Control and Dynamical Systems Group presented 8 papers at IFAC NMPC conference
    Date: August 19, 2018 - August 22, 2018
    Where: IFAC NMPC, Madison, WI
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • The 6th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), http://www.nmpc2018.org/, is a highly focused conference that attracts experts in this area from around the world. Members of the Control and Dynamical Systems group presented 8 papers (out of the 149 at the conference!) Stefano Di Cairano delivered one of the 7 plenary lectures entitled "Contract-Based Design of Control Architectures by Model Predictive Control.".
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  •  NEWS    Elizabeth Phillips, MERL's Head of HR selected to coach at the Massachusetts Conference for Women
    Date: December 5, 2018 - December 6, 2018
    Where: Boston Convention Center
    MERL Contact: Elizabeth Phillips
    Brief
    • Elizabeth Philips, CPC, has been selected by the International Coach Federation of New England, to provide career coaching at the MA Conference for Women. This conference brings together thousands of active professionals to connect and harness the collective wisdom, experience and energy of inspirational women and men of all ages and backgrounds to help amplify the influence of women in the workplace and beyond.
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  •  NEWS    Mouhacine Benosman joins the Editorial Board of the new Wiley Journal of Advanced Control for Applications
    Date: November 1, 2018
    MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
    Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • Wiley has recently launched the Journal of Advanced Control for Applications: Engineering and Industrial Systems, which seeks original and high-quality contributions on the design of advanced control for applications. The aim is to stimulate the adoption of new and improved control design methods and provide a forum for the discussion of control application problems. Papers for the journal must include sufficient novelty in either the control design methods, the modelling and simulation techniques used, or the applications studied. MERL researcher, Mouhacine Benosman, has been invited to join the Editorial Board of this new journal.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Researchers Demonstrate Robot Learning Technology at CEATEC'18
    Date: October 15, 2018 - October 19, 2018
    Where: CEATEC'18, Makuhari Messe, Tokyo
    MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Daniel N. Nikovski; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Analytics, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL's work on robot learning algorithms was demonstrated at CEATEC'18, Japan's largest IT and electronics exhibition and conference held annually at Makuhari Messe near Tokyo. A team of researchers from the Data Analytics Group at MERL and the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Information Technology Center (ITC) of MELCO presented an interactive demonstration of a model-based artificial intelligence algorithm that learns how to control equipment autonomously. The algorithm developed at MERL constructs models of mechanical equipment through repeated trial and error, and then learns control policies based on these models. The demonstration used a circular maze, where the objective is to drive a ball to the center of the maze by tipping and tilting the maze, a task that is difficult even for humans; approximately half of the CEATEC'18 visitors who tried to steer the ball by means of a joystick could not bring it to the center of the maze within one minute. In contrast, MERL's algorithm successfully learned how to drive the ball to the goal within ten seconds without the need for human programming. The demo was at the entrance of MELCO's booth at CEATEC'18, inviting visitors to learn more about MELCO's many other AI technologies on display, and was seen by an estimated more than 50,000 visitors over the five days of the expo.
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  •  NEWS    MERL collaborates with MIT on heat management in compact fusion reactors
    Date: October 11, 2018
    MERL Contact: Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Area: Multi-Physical Modeling
    Brief
    • A new approach to heat management in compact fusion reactors that emerged from a class at MIT, developed by graduate student Adam Kuang and 14 other MIT students, engineers from Commonwealth Fusion Systems as well as Piyush Grover and Chris Laughman from MERL, and Professor Dennis Whyte, was recently published in Fusion Engineering and Design. This solution was made possible by an innovative approach to compact fusion reactors, using high-temperature superconducting magnets. This method formed the basis for a massive new research program launched this year at MIT and the creation of an independent startup company to develop the concept. The new design, unlike that of typical fusion plants, would make it possible to open the device's internal chamber and replace critical components; this capability is essential for the newly proposed heat-draining mechanism.

      In the one-semester graduate class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), students were divided into teams to address different aspects of the heat rejection challenge. These teams evaluated alternate concepts and subjected candidate designs to detailed calculations and simulations based, in part, on data from decades of research on research fusion devices such as MIT's Alcator C-Mod, which was retired two years ago. C-Mod scientist Brian LaBombard also shared insights on new kinds of divertors, and two engineers from MERL worked with the team as well. Several of the students continued working on the project after the class ended, ultimately leading to the solution described in this new paper.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researcher gave an invited talk of polar coding at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Boston Photonics Seminar Series
    Date: September 19, 2018
    Where: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Area: Communications
    Brief
    • Toshiaki Koike-Akino gave an invited talk on new trends of forward error correction codes based on polar coding at seminar series of IEEE Boston Photonics Society at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The talk covered recent advancement of polar code design for ultra-high-throughput decoding, suited for future Tera-bit optical interconnects.
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  •  NEWS    Takaaki Hori leads speech technology workshop
    Date: June 25, 2018 - August 3, 2018
    Where: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL Speech & Audio Team researcher Takaaki Hori led a team of 27 senior researchers and Ph.D. students from different organizations around the world, working on "Multi-lingual End-to-End Speech Recognition for Incomplete Data" as part of the Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT). The JSALT workshop is a renowned 6-week hands-on workshop held yearly since 1995. This year, the workshop was held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from June 25 to August 3, 2018. Takaaki's team developed new methods for end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with a focus on low-resource languages with limited labelled data.

      End-to-end ASR can significantly reduce the burden of developing ASR systems for new languages, by eliminating the need for linguistic information such as pronunciation dictionaries. Some end-to-end systems have recently achieved performance comparable to or better than conventional systems in several tasks. However, the current model training algorithms basically require paired data, i.e., speech data and the corresponding transcription. Sufficient amount of such complete data is usually unavailable for minor languages, and creating such data sets is very expensive and time consuming.

      The goal of Takaaki's team project was to expand the applicability of end-to-end models to multilingual ASR, and to develop new technology that would make it possible to build highly accurate systems even for low-resource languages without a large amount of paired data. Some major accomplishments of the team include building multi-lingual end-to-end ASR systems for 17 languages, developing novel architectures and training methods for end-to-end ASR, building end-to-end ASR-TTS (Text-to-speech) chain for unpaired data training, and developing ESPnet, an open-source end-to-end speech processing toolkit. Three papers stemming from the team's work have already been accepted to the 2018 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), with several more to be submitted to upcoming conferences.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Organizes session on Autonomous Vehicles at 2018 Conference on Control Technologies and Applications
    Date: August 21, 2018 - July 24, 2018
    Where: CCTA2018 Copenhagen
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Karl Berntorp and Stefano Di Cairano organized an industry session on Autonomous Vehicles at the 2018 Conference on Control Technologies and Applications, Aug. 21-24. (http://ccta2018.ieeecss.org/) They will present the main tutorial paper in the session. Such industry sessions are organized by researchers that are well established in terms of both academic relevance and real-world impact of their research.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researcher presented an invited talk and 2 papers at Advanced Photonics Congress 2018
    Date: July 2, 2018 - July 5, 2018
    Where: Advanced Photonics Congress 2018
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Three papers from the Optical Communication team were presented at Advanced Photonics Congress, held at ETH Switzerland from 2-5 July 2018. One of the papers was an invited talk of MERL's recent advancement in high-speed reliable coded modulation schemes based on polar coding. The other papers are related to fiber nonlinearity mitigation techniques based on pulse-shaping filter optimization and deep neural networks.
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  •  NEWS    MERL demonstrated Advanced All-digital Transmitter at 5G Interactive Theater during International Microwave Symposium(IMS)2018 Week
    Date: June 13, 2018
    Where: Philadelphia, PA
    MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Invited by IEEE MTT-S (Microwave Theory and Techniques Society), Researcher Dr. Rui Ma attended and presented MERL's cutting edge technology demonstration on real-time of multi-band All-Digital Transmitter at 5G Interactive Theater, which was held during IMS2018 in Philadelphia, PA on June 13th 2018. All-digital transmitter (ADT) is envisioned as a key enabling technology for next generation software defined radio.
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  •  NEWS    Stefano Di Cairano organizes and presents a tutorial on "Real-Time Optimization and Model Predictive Control for Aerospace and Automotive Applications" at the 2018 American Control Conference
    Date: June 27, 2018
    Where: American Control Conference, 2018
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Area: Control
    Brief
    • MERL's Stefano Di Cairano, in collaboration with University of Michigan's Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky have organized a tutorial session at the 2018 American Control Conference on "Real-Time Optimization and Model Predictive Control for Aerospace and Automotive Applications", and will present the main tutorial paper.

      Tutorial sessions are organized by researchers that are well established in terms of both academic relevance and real world impact of their research.
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