News & Events

216 MERL Events and MERL Talks found.


  •  TALK    Foundations of Green Communications
    Date & Time: Friday, September 23, 2016; 12:00 PM- 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Earl McCune, Eridan Communications
    Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
    Abstract
    • To maximize the operating energy efficiency of any wireless communication link requires a global optimization not only across the entire block diagram, but also including the selected signal modulation and aspects of the link operating protocol. Achieving this global optimization is first examined for the transmitter, receiver, and baseband circuitry. Then the important aspects of signal modulation necessary to access these circuit optimizations, with examples, are presented, followed by the correspondingly important protocol aspects needed. A metric called modulation-available energy efficiency (MAEE) compares proposed signals for compatibility with high energy efficiency objectives.
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  •  TALK    Atomic-level modelling of materials with applications to semi-conductors
    Date & Time: Wednesday, August 17, 2016; 1 PM
    Speaker: Gilles Zerah, Centre Francais en Calcul Atomique et Moleculaire-Ile-de-France (CFCAM-IdF)
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
    Abstract
    • The first part of the talk is a high-level review of modern technologies for atomic-level modelling of materials. The second part discusses band gap calculations and MERL results for semi-conductors.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Hosts 2nd Annual Women In Science Celebration
    Date & Time: Friday, July 22, 2016; 12:00 Noon
    Location: Cambridge Brewery
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • MERL hosted its 2nd Annual "Women In Science Celebration". MERL's current team of female interns discussed and celebrated the contributions they've made during their internships at MERL.
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  •  TALK    A computational spectral graph theory tutorial
    Date & Time: Wednesday, July 13, 2016; 2:30 PM - 3:30
    Speaker: Richard Lehoucq, Sandia National Laboratories
    Research Areas: Computer Vision, Digital Video, Machine Learning
    Abstract
    • My presentation considers the research question of whether existing algorithms and software for the large-scale sparse eigenvalue problem can be applied to problems in spectral graph theory. I first provide an introduction to several problems involving spectral graph theory. I then provide a review of several different algorithms for the large-scale eigenvalue problem and briefly introduce the Anasazi package of eigensolvers.
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  •  EVENT    MERL participates in SIAM Career fair
    Date & Time: Monday, July 11, 2016; 10 AM - 9:15 PM
    Location: Westin Boston Waterfront Pavilion, Boston, Massachusetts
    MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Arvind Raghunathan
    Brief
    • MERL researchers participate in SIAM Job fair to showcase MERL's research and highlight employment and intern opportunities at MERL. The Career Fair emphasizes careers in business, industry, and government, and takes place during the SIAM Annual Meeting.

      The SIAM Applied Mathematics and Computational Science Career Fair is an informational and interactive event at which employers and prospective employees can discuss careers. It is a great opportunity for prospective employees to meet government and industry representatives and discuss what they are looking for and what each employer has to offer.
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  •  TALK    Controlling the Grid Edge: Emerging Grid Operation Paradigms
    Date & Time: Thursday, July 7, 2016; 2:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Sonja Glavaski, Program Director, ARPA-E
    MERL Host: Arvind Raghunathan
    Research Area: Electric Systems
    Abstract
    • The evolution of the grid faces significant challenges if it is to integrate and accept more energy from renewable generation and other Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). To maintain grid's reliability and turn intermittent power sources into major contributors to the U.S. energy mix, we have to think about the grid differently and design it to be smarter and more flexible.

      ARPA-E is interested in disruptive technologies that enable increased integration of DERs by real-time adaptation while maintaining grid reliability and reducing cost for customers with smart technologies. The potential impact is significant, with projected annual energy savings of more than 3 quadrillion BTU and annual CO2 emissions reductions of more than 250 million metric tons.

      This talk will identify opportunities in developing next generation control technologies and grid operation paradigms that address these challenges and enable secure, stable, and reliable transmission and distribution of electrical power. Summary of newly announced ARPA-E NODES (Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems) Program funding development of these technologies will be presented.
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  •  EVENT    MERL celebrates 25 years of innovation
    Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
    Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL celebrated 25 years of innovation on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. The event was a great success, with inspiring keynote talks, insightful panel sessions, and an exciting research showcase of MERL's latest breakthroughs.

      Please visit the event page to view photos of each session, video presentations, as well as a commemorative booklet that highlights past and current research.
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  •  TALK    Speech structure and its application to speech processing -- Relational, holistic and abstract representation of speech
    Date & Time: Friday, June 3, 2016; 1:30PM - 3:00PM
    Speaker: Nobuaki Minematsu and Daisuke Saito, The University of Tokyo
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Speech signals covey various kinds of information, which are grouped into two kinds, linguistic and extra-linguistic information. Many speech applications, however, focus on only a single aspect of speech. For example, speech recognizers try to extract only word identity from speech and speaker recognizers extract only speaker identity. Here, irrelevant features are often treated as hidden or latent by applying the probability theory to a large number of samples or the irrelevant features are normalized to have quasi-standard values. In speech analysis, however, phases are usually removed, not hidden or normalized, and pitch harmonics are also removed, not hidden or normalized. The resulting speech spectrum still contains both linguistic information and extra-linguistic information. Is there any good method to remove extra-linguistic information from the spectrum? In this talk, our answer to that question is introduced, called speech structure. Extra-linguistic variation can be modeled as feature space transformation and our speech structure is based on the transform-invariance of f-divergence. This proposal was inspired by findings in classical studies of structural phonology and recent studies of developmental psychology. Speech structure has been applied to accent clustering, speech recognition, and language identification. These applications are also explained in the talk.
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  •  TALK    On computer simulation of multiscale processes in porous electrodes of Li-ion batteries
    Date & Time: Friday, May 13, 2016; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Oleg Iliev, Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics, ITWM
    Research Area: Dynamical Systems
    Abstract
    • Li-ion batteries are widely used in automotive industry, in electronic devices, etc. In this talk we will discuss challenges related to the multiscale nature of batteries, mainly the understanding of processes in the porous electrodes at pore scale and at macroscale. A software tool for simulation of isothermal and non-isothermal electrochemical processes in porous electrodes will be presented. The pore scale simulations are done on 3D images of porous electrodes, or on computer generated 3D microstructures, which have the same characterization as real porous electrodes. Finite Volume and Finite Element algorithms for the highly nonlinear problems describing processes at pore level will be shortly presented. Model order reduction, MOR, empirical interpolation method, EIM-MOR algorithms for acceleration of the computations will be discussed, as well as the reduced basis method for studying parameters dependent problems. Next, homogenization of the equations describing the electrochemical processes at the pore scale will be presented, and the results will be compared to the engineering approach based on Newman's 1D+1D model. Simulations at battery cell level will also be addressed. Finally, the challenges in modeling and simulation of degradation processes in the battery will be discussed and our first simulation results in this area will be presented.

      This is joint work with A.Latz (DLR), M.Taralov, V.Taralova, J.Zausch, S.Zhang from Fraunhofer ITWM, Y.Maday from LJLL, Paris 6 and Y.Efendiev from Texas A&M.
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  •  EVENT    John Hershey Invited to Speak at Deep Learning Summit 2016 in Boston
    Date: Thursday, May 12, 2016 - Friday, May 13, 2016
    Location: Deep Learning Summit, Boston, MA
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL Speech and Audio Senior Team Leader John Hershey is among a set of high-profile researchers invited to speak at the Deep Learning Summit 2016 in Boston on May 12-13, 2016. John will present the team's groundbreaking work on general sound separation using a novel deep learning framework called Deep Clustering. For the first time, an artificial intelligence is able to crack the half-century-old "cocktail party problem", that is, to isolate the speech of a single person from a mixture of multiple unknown speakers, as humans do when having a conversation in a loud crowd.
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  •  TALK    Advanced Recurrent Neural Networks for Automatic Speech Recognition
    Date & Time: Friday, April 29, 2016; 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Yu Zhang, MIT
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of neural network models where connections between its neurons form a directed cycle. This creates an internal state of the network which allows it to exhibit dynamic temporal behavior. Recently the RNN-based acoustic models greatly improved automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy on many tasks, such as an advanced version of the RNN, which exploits a structure called long-short-term memory (LSTM). However, ASR performance with distant microphones, low resources, noisy, reverberant conditions, and on multi-talker speech are still far from satisfactory as compared to humans. To address these issues, we develop new strucute of RNNs inspired by two principles: (1) the structure follows the intuition of human speech recognition; (2) the structure is easy to optimize. The talk will go beyond basic RNNs, introduce prediction-adaptation-correction RNNs (PAC-RNNs) and highway LSTMs (HLSTMs). It studies both uni-directional and bi-direcitonal RNNs and discriminative training also applied on top the RNNs. For efficient training of such RNNs, the talk will describe two algorithms for learning their parameters in some detail: (1) Latency-Controlled bi-directional model training; and (2) Two pass forward computation for sequence training. Finally, this talk will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of different variants and propose future directions.
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  •  EVENT    MERL to celebrate 25 years of innovation
    Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
    Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • A celebration event to mark MERL's 25th anniversary will be held on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. This event will feature keynote talks, panel sessions, and a research showcase. The event itself is invitation-only, but videos and other highlights will be made available online. Further details about the program can be obtained at the link below.
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  •  TALK    Driver's mental workload estimation based on the reflex eye movement
    Date & Time: Tuesday, March 15, 2016; 12:45 PM - 1:30 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Hirofumi Aoki, Nagoya University
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Driving requires a complex skill that is involved with the vehicle itself (e.g., speed control and instrument operation), other road users (e.g., other vehicles, pedestrians), surrounding environment, and so on. During driving, visual cues are the main source to supply information to the brain. In order to stabilize the visual information when you are moving, the eyes move to the opposite direction based on the input to the vestibular system. This involuntary eye movement is called as the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and the physiological models have been studied so far. Obinata et al. found that the VOR can be used to estimate mental workload. Since then, our research group has been developing methods to quantitatively estimate mental workload during driving by means of reflex eye movement. In this talk, I will explain the basic mechanism of the reflex eye movement and how to apply for mental workload estimation. I also introduce the latest work to combine the VOR and OKR (optokinetic reflex) models for naturalistic driving environment.
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  •  TALK    A data-centric approach to driving behavior research: How can signal processing methods contribute to the development of autonomous driving?
    Date & Time: Tuesday, March 15, 2016; 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Kazuya Takeda, Nagoya University
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Thanks to advanced "internet of things" (IoT) technologies, situation-specific human behavior has become an area of development for practical applications involving signal processing. One important area of development of such practical applications is driving behavior research. Since 1999, I have been collecting driving behavior data in a wide range of signal modalities, including speech/sound, video, physical/physiological sensors, CAN bus, LIDAR and GNSS. The objective of this data collection is to evaluate how well signal models can represent human behavior while driving. In this talk, I would like to summarize our 10 years of study of driving behavior signal processing, which has been based on these signal corpora. In particular, statistical signal models of interactions between traffic contexts and driving behavior, i.e., stochastic driver modeling, will be discussed, in the context of risky lane change detection. I greatly look forward to discussing the scalability of such corpus-based approaches, which could be applied to almost any traffic situation.
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  •  TALK    Emotion Detection for Health Related Issues
    Date & Time: Tuesday, February 16, 2016; 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Najim Dehak, MIT
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Recently, there has been a great increase of interest in the field of emotion recognition based on different human modalities, such as speech, heart rate etc. Emotion recognition systems can be very useful in several areas, such as medical and telecommunications. In the medical field, identifying the emotions can be an important tool for detecting and monitoring patients with mental health disorder. In addition, the identification of the emotional state from voice provides opportunities for the development of automated dialogue system capable of producing reports to the physician based on frequent phone communication between the system and the patients. In this talk, we will describe a health related application of using emotion recognition system based on human voices in order to detect and monitor the emotion state of people.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Researcher Leads an HVAC Industry Publicity Event
    Date: Friday, November 6, 2015
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating
    MERL Contact: Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Area: Data Analytics
    Brief
    • Chris Laughman of MERL and Kevin Miskewicz of MEUS-HVAC led a webinar on Friday, November 6 with over 20 leading HVAC industry trade publications on new products that are being released, as well as the role that MERL plays in advancing the forefront of technology within Mitsubishi Electric. Titled "Inventing the Future of VRF (and Other Neat Stuff)", they discussed the innovations embodied in the new L-generation City-Multi system, as well as trends in the HVAC industry and some recently published MERL research in the HVAC area.
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  •  TALK    Skewness in the Passive Tracer Problem
    Date & Time: Monday, November 23, 2015; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Manuchehr Aminian, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
    Abstract
    • The classic work by G.I. Taylor describes the enhanced longitudinal diffusivity of a passive tracer subjected to laminar pipe flow. Much work since then has gone into extending this result particularly in calculating the evolution of the scalar variance. However, less work has been done to describe the evolution of asymmetry in the distribution. We present the results from a modeling effort to understand how the higher moments of the tracer distribution depend on geometry based off of explicit results in the circular pipe. We do this via analysis of "channel-limiting" geometries (rectangular ducts and elliptical pipes parameterized by their aspect ratio), using both new analytical tools and Monte Carlo simulation, which have revealed a wealth of nontrivial behavior of the distributions at short and intermediate time.
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2015 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date: Thursday, October 22, 2015
    Location: Google, New York City, NY
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2015, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 22, 2015 at Google, in New York City, NY.

      It is a follow-up to SANE 2012, held at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), SANE 2013, held at Columbia University, and SANE 2014, held at MIT, which each gathered 70 to 90 researchers and students.

      SANE 2015 will feature invited talks by leading researchers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community: Rohit Prasad (Amazon), Michael Mandel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Ron Weiss (Google), John Hershey (MERL), Pablo Sprechmann (NYU), Tuomas Virtanen (Tampere University of Technology), and Paris Smaragdis (UIUC). It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers.

      SANE 2015 is organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Hank Liao (Google), Andrew Senior (Google), and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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  •  EVENT    Celebrating "Women in Science at MERL" luncheon
    Date & Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2015; 12:00
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
    MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang
    Brief
    • To celebrate "Women in Science at MERL," a luncheon event was organized on August 4. Eleven female interns, three female researchers, and female members of HQ staff, interns, hosts/managers and MERL executives participated in that event. All female interns introduced their research projects and their positive experiences at MERL; female researchers shared their own career development stories; and at the end all discussed how to be successful in the field of science. Every participant was inspired to continue contributing to the future of science.
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  •  EVENT    ICME 2015 - IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
    Date: Wednesday, July 1, 2015
    Location: Torino, Italy
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro is the General Co-chair of ICME 2015, the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, to be held in Torino, Italy, in July 2015.
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  •  EVENT    Internships & Careers at MERL
    Date & Time: Friday, December 5, 2014; 12:00 noon - 2:00 pm
    Location: Tufts University, Halligan Hall, Room 102
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • Come learn about MERL, our internships and our career options.

      Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) is home to some of the world's leading experts conducting fundamental and applied research in a variety of areas, such as Computer Vision, Audio & Video Processing, Digital Communications, Data Analytics, Mechatronics and Algorithms. Our overriding vision is to deliver innovation that has a lasting impact on the world--innovation that will be remembered 100 years from now.

      Each year, we hire 40-60 talented and motivated graduate students for summer internships. Come learn more about the work we do and meet with some of our researchers. The reception will include an a brief overview of our research and some demos. We will also have pizza and cupcakes!

      For those of you ready to graduate, we also have several research staff and post-doc openings. Hiring managers and researchers will be on hand to discuss these career opportunities at MERL.

      Session Agenda
      12:00 - 12:15 Welcome, sign-in
      12:15 - 12:30 Research overview
      12:30 - 1:30 Demos & discussion.
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  •  EVENT    Internships & Careers at MERL
    Date & Time: Monday, November 17, 2014; 1:00-2:30 pm
    Location: Northeastern University, Curry Student Center - Room 340
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) conducts fundamental and applied research in the areas of signal processing, optimization and control. Each year, we hire 40-60 talented and motivated graduate students for summer internships. Come learn more about the work we do and meet with our researchers. The reception will include an a brief overview of our research and some demos, as well as light snacks and refreshments.

      For those of you that are ready to graduate, we also have several research staff and post-doc openings. Hiring managers will be on hand to discuss these career opportunities at MERL.

      Session Agenda
      1:00 - 1:15 Welcome, sign-in
      1:15 - 1:30 Research overview
      1:30 - 2:30 Demos & discussion.
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2014 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date: Thursday, October 23, 2014
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2014, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 23, 2014 at MIT, in Cambridge, MA. It is a follow-up to SANE 2012, held at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and SANE 2013, held at Columbia University, which each gathered around 70 researchers and students. SANE 2014 will feature invited talks by leading researchers from the Northeast as well as Europe: Najim Dehak (MIT), Hakan Erdogan (MERL/Sabanci University), Gael Richard (Telecom ParisTech), George Saon (IBM Research), Andrew Senior (Google Research), Stavros Tsakalidis (BBN - Raytheon), and David Wingate (Lyric). It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers. SANE 2014 is organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Jim Glass (MIT), and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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  •  EVENT    107th MPEG meeting
    Date: Monday, January 13, 2014 - Friday, January 17, 2014
    Location: San Jose, CA
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL is a sponsor for the 107th MPEG meeting to be held in San Jose, CA, in January 2014. MERL researcher Anthony Vetro serves as Head of the US Delegation to MPEG.
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  •  EVENT    MERL intern recruiting and cupcakes
    Date & Time: Wednesday, November 6, 2013; 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
    Location: MIT, Kiva room @CSAIL
    MERL Contact: Matthew Brand
    Brief
    • Every year, MIT neighbor Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs hires 40-60 talented and motivated graduate students for summer internships in CS/EE-oriented research projects, aimed at real-world impact and high-quality publications. Join us for our kick-off recruiting reception at the Kiva/Patel room Wednesday 1-3pm. There will be a short overview of current research areas, confections, and MERL researchers on hand to discuss research opportunities. .
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