- Date: August 3, 2020
Where: Cambridge, MA
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is excited to welcome Abraham P. Vinod as the newest member of its research staff, in the Control for Autonomy Team. Abraham joins MERL from the University of Texas, Austin, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. His PhD research produced scalable algorithms for providing safety guarantees for stochastic, control-constrained, dynamical systems, with applications to motion planning. In his postdoctoral research, Abraham studied theory and algorithms for on-the-fly, data-driven control of unknown systems under severely limited data. His current research interests lie in the intersection of optimization, control, and learning. Abraham won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2017 ACM Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control Conference, was a finalist for the Best Paper Award in the 2018 ACM Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control Conference, and won the best undergraduate student research project award at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
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- Date: July 22, 2020
Where: Tokyo, Japan
MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Tim K. Marks; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that the company has developed what it believes to be the world’s first technology capable of highly natural and intuitive interaction with humans based on a scene-aware capability to translate multimodal sensing information into natural language.
The novel technology, Scene-Aware Interaction, incorporates Mitsubishi Electric’s proprietary Maisart® compact AI technology to analyze multimodal sensing information for highly natural and intuitive interaction with humans through context-dependent generation of natural language. The technology recognizes contextual objects and events based on multimodal sensing information, such as images and video captured with cameras, audio information recorded with microphones, and localization information measured with LiDAR.
Scene-Aware Interaction for car navigation, one target application, will provide drivers with intuitive route guidance. The technology is also expected to have applicability to human-machine interfaces for in-vehicle infotainment, interaction with service robots in building and factory automation systems, systems that monitor the health and well-being of people, surveillance systems that interpret complex scenes for humans and encourage social distancing, support for touchless operation of equipment in public areas, and much more. The technology is based on recent research by MERL's Speech & Audio and Computer Vision groups.
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- Date: July 14, 2020
Where: Tokyo, Japan
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced today its developement of a new technology to realize a gallium nitride (GaN) power amplifier module for 5G base-stations that offers a combination of compact (6mm by 10mm) footprint and high power-efficiency, the latter exceeding an unprecedented rating of 43%.
MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers collaborated to develop high density mounting technology and matching circuit that uses a minimum number of chip components to achieve efficient, wide-band power amplification in the 3.4-3.8GHz bands used for 5G communication.
Please see the link below for the full Mitsubishi Electric press release text. Technical details of the new module will be presented at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium this coming August.
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- Date: July 10, 2020
Where: Virtual Baltimore, MD
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist and Speech and Audio Senior Team Leader Jonathan Le Roux was invited by the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University to give a plenary lecture at the 2020 Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT). The talk, entitled "Deep Learning for Multifarious Speech Processing: Tackling Multiple Speakers, Microphones, and Languages", presented an overview of deep learning techniques developed at MERL towards the goal of cracking the Tower of Babel version of the cocktail party problem, that is, separating and/or recognizing the speech of multiple unknown speakers speaking simultaneously in multiple languages, in both single-channel and multi-channel scenarios: from deep clustering to chimera networks, phasebook and friends, and from seamless ASR to MIMO-Speech and Transformer-based multi-speaker ASR.
JSALT 2020 is the seventh in a series of six-week-long research workshops on Machine Learning for Speech Language and Computer Vision Technology. A continuation of the well known Johns Hopkins University summer workshops, these workshops bring together diverse "dream teams" of leading professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates, in a truly cooperative, intensive, and substantive effort to advance the state of the science. MERL researchers led such teams in the JSALT 2015 workshop, on "Far-Field Speech Enhancement and Recognition in Mismatched Settings", and the JSALT 2018 workshop, on "Multi-lingual End-to-End Speech Recognition for Incomplete Data".
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- Date: July 12, 2020 - July 18, 2020
Where: Vienna, Austria (virtual this year)
MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Devesh K. Jha; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - MERL researchers are presenting three papers at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020), which is virtually held this year from 12-18th July. ICML is one of the top-tier conferences in machine learning with an acceptance rate of 22%. The MERL papers are:
1) "Finite-time convergence in Continuous-Time Optimization" by Orlando Romero and Mouhacine Benosman.
2) "Can Increasing Input Dimensionality Improve Deep Reinforcement Learning?" by Kei Ota, Tomoaki Oiki, Devesh Jha, Toshisada Mariyama, and Daniel Nikovski.
3) "Representation Learning Using Adversarially-Contrastive Optimal Transport" by Anoop Cherian and Shuchin Aeron.
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- Date: July 1, 2020 - July 3, 2020
Where: Denver, Colorado (virtual)
MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Yebin Wang; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the American Control Conference, MERL presented 10 papers on subjects including autonomous-vehicle decision making and motion planning, nonlinear estimation for thermal-fluid models and GNSS positioning, learning-based reference governors and reference governors for railway vehicles, and fail-safe rendezvous control.
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- Date: June 22, 2020
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - We are excited to announce that Dr. Zhong-Qiu Wang, who recently obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, has joined MERL's Speech and Audio Team as a Visiting Research Scientist. Zhong-Qiu brings strong expertise in microphone array processing, speech enhancement, blind source/speaker separation, and robust automatic speech recognition, for which he has developed some of the most advanced machine learning and deep learning methods.
Prior to joining MERL, Zhong-Qiu received the B.Eng. degree in 2013 from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in 2017 and 2020 from The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, all in Computer Science. He was a summer research intern at Microsoft Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and Google AI. He received a Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP 2018 for his work as an intern at MERL, and a Graduate Research Award from OSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2020.
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- Date: June 18, 2020
Awarded to: Tong Huang, Hongbo Sun, K.J. Kim, Daniel Nikovski, Le Xie
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Hongbo Sun
Research Areas: Data Analytics, Electric Systems, Optimization
Brief - A paper on A Holistic Framework for Parameter Coordination of Interconnected Microgrids Against Natural Disasters, written by Tong Huang, a former MERL intern from Texas A&M University, has been selected as one of the Best Conference Papers at the 2020 Power and Energy Society General Meeting (PES-GM). IEEE PES-GM is the flagship conference for the IEEE Power and Energy Society. The work was done in collaboration with Hongbo Sun, K. J. Kim, and Daniel Nikovski from MERL, and Tong's advisor, Prof. Le Xie from Texas A&M University.
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- Date: June 7, 2020 - June 11, 2020
Where: Dublin, Ireland
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Digital Video
Brief - Due to COVID-19, MERL Network Intelligence Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2020, that was scheduled to be held in Dublin Ireland from June 7-11, 2020. Topics presented include recent advances in deep learning methods for communications and new access systems. Presentation videos are also found on our YouTube channel. Our developed technologies can facilitate a great advancement in broadband virtual conferencing which is required in post-COVID-19 society.
IEEE ICC 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 2,900 scientific researchers submit proposals for program sessions to be held at the annual conference. The high-quality proposals are selected for the conference program, which includes technical papers, tutorials, workshops and industry sessions designed specifically to advance technologies, systems and infrastructure that are continuing to reshape the world and provide all users with access to an unprecedented spectrum of high-speed, seamless and cost-effective global telecommunications services.
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- Date: June 14, 2020 - June 19, 2020
MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Michael J. Jones; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Tim K. Marks; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researchers are presenting four papers (two oral papers and two posters) and organizing two workshops at the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2020) conference.
CVPR 2020 Orals with MERL authors:
1. "Dynamic Multiscale Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton Based Human Motion Prediction," by Maosen Li, Siheng Chen, Yangheng Zhao, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Qi Tian
2. "Collaborative Motion Prediction via Neural Motion Message Passing," by Yue Hu, Siheng Chen, Ya Zhang, Xiao Gu
CVPR 2020 Posters with MERL authors:
3. "LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks’ Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood," by Abhinav Kumar, Tim K. Marks, Wenxuan Mou, Ye Wang, Michael Jones, Anoop Cherian, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Xiaoming Liu, Chen Feng
4. "MotionNet: Joint Perception and Motion Prediction for Autonomous Driving Based on Bird’s Eye View Maps," by Pengxiang Wu, Siheng Chen, Dimitris N. Metaxas
CVPR 2020 Workshops co-organized by MERL researchers:
1. Fair, Data-Efficient and Trusted Computer Vision
2. Deep Declarative Networks.
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- Date: June 9, 2020
Where: ICRAxMIT
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave an invited talk at the workshop ICRAxMIT organized at MIT. The talk briefly described a derivative-free framework that doesn't take in consideration velocities and accelerations to model and control robotic systems. The proposed approach is validated in two real robotic systems.
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- Date: June 8, 2020 - June 12, 2020
Where: Virtual Hangzhou
MERL Contact: Pu (Perry) Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL researcher Pu (Perry) Wang organized a special session on June 10, 2020 titled Automotive Radar Sensing. Presentations included topics from deep waveform design, object tracking, mutual interference mitigation with their applications to high-resolution automotive imaging. The session's contributors come from both academia and industry.
In this special session, our previous intern Yuxuan Xia (Chalmers Institute of Technology, Sweden) presented our work on extended object tracking using low-cost automotive radar sensors with a realistic measurement model. Yuxuan was also selected to be one of the six best student paper finalists at IEEE SAM 2020.
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- 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: 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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