- Date & Time: Tuesday, October 12, 2021; 1:00 PM EST
Speaker: Prof. Greg Ongie, Marquette University
MERL Host: Hassan Mansour
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Abstract 
Deep learning is emerging as powerful tool to solve challenging inverse problems in computational imaging, including basic image restoration tasks like denoising and deblurring, as well as image reconstruction problems in medical imaging. This talk will give an overview of the state-of-the-art supervised learning techniques in this area and discuss two recent innovations: deep equilibrium architectures, which allows one to train an effectively infinite-depth reconstruction network; and model adaptation methods, that allow one to adapt a pre-trained reconstruction network to changes in the imaging forward model at test time.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, September 28, 2021; 1:00 PM EST
Speaker: Dr. Ruohan Gao, Stanford University
MERL Host: Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Abstract 
While computer vision has made significant progress by "looking" — detecting objects, actions, or people based on their appearance — it often does not listen. Yet cognitive science tells us that perception develops by making use of all our senses without intensive supervision. Towards this goal, in this talk I will present my research on audio-visual learning — We disentangle object sounds from unlabeled video, use audio as an efficient preview for action recognition in untrimmed video, decode the monaural soundtrack into its binaural counterpart by injecting visual spatial information, and use echoes to interact with the environment for spatial image representation learning. Together, these are steps towards multimodal understanding of the visual world, where audio serves as both the semantic and spatial signals. In the end, I will also briefly talk about our latest work on multisensory learning for robotics.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, September 14, 2021; 1:00 PM EST
Speaker: Prof. David Bergman, University of Connecticut
MERL Host: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Optimization
Abstract 
The integration of machine learning and optimization opens the door to new modeling paradigms that have already proven successful across a broad range of industries. Sports betting is a particularly exciting application area, where recent advances in both analytics and optimization can provide a lucrative edge. In this talk we will discuss three algorithmic sports betting games where combinations of machine learning and optimization have netted me significant winnings.
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- Date: September 7, 2021
MERL Contact: Anoop Cherian
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - Anoop Cherian, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision group, gave an invited virtual talk on "InSeGAN: An Unsupervised Approach to Identical Instance Segmentation" at the Visual Information Laboratory of University of Bristol, UK. The talk described a new approach to segmenting varied appearances of nearly identical 3D objects in depth images. More details of the talk can be found in the following paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13865, which will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'21).
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- Date: August 12, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.
Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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- Date: July 13, 2021
Where: Robotics: Science and Systems
MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. 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: June 18, 2021
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 15, 2021
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 K. 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: 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 & Time: Tuesday, February 16, 2021; 11:00-12:00
Speaker: Prof. Pere Gilabert, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Abstract - Digital predistortion (DPD) linearization is the most common and spread solution to cope with power amplifiers (PA) inherent linearity versus efficiency trade-off. The use of new radio 5G spectrally efficient signals with high peak-to-average power ratios (PAPR) occupying wider bandwidths only aggravates such compromise. When considering wide bandwidth signals, carrier aggregation or multi-band configurations in high efficient transmitter architectures, such as Doherty PAs, load-modulated balanced amplifiers, envelope tracking PAs or outphasing transmitters, the number of parameters required in the DPD model to compensate for both nonlinearities and memory effects can be unacceptably high. This has a negative impact in the DPD model extraction/adaptation, because it increases the computational complexity and drives to over-fitting and uncertainty.
This talk will discuss the use of machine learning techniques for DPD linearization. The use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) for adaptive DPD linearization and approaches to reduce the coefficients adaptation time will be discussed. In addition, an overview on several feature-extraction techniques used to reduce the number of parameters of the DPD linearization system as well as to ensure proper, well-conditioned estimation for related variables will be presented.
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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 V. 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: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. 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 & Time: Wednesday, December 9, 2020; 1:00-5:00PM EST
Location: Virtual
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
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- Date: November 16, 2020
MERL Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Daniel N. Nikovski; Diego Romeres
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 K. 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 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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- Date: February 4, 2021
Where: N/A
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning
Brief - Dr. Diego Romeres, Principal Research Scientist in the Data Analytics group, will serve on the Programme Committee for the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), 2021.
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- Date: August 23, 2020
Where: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), online, 2020
MERL Contact: Anoop Cherian
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Principal Research Scientist Anoop Cherian gave an invited talk titled "Sound2Sight: Audio-Conditioned Visual Imagination" at the Multi-modal Video Analysis workshop held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020. The talk was based on a recent ECCV paper that describes a new multimodal reasoning task called Sound2Sight and a generative adversarial machine learning algorithm for producing plausible video sequences conditioned on sound and visual context.
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- Date: August 25, 2020
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty co-organized an invited session on “Data-Driven Control For Industrial Applications” at the IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications with Shahin Shahrampour (Asst. Prof., Texas A&M). Talks covered topics including reinforcement learning for aerospace systems, constrained reinforcement learning for motors, deep Q learning for traffic systems and participants included speakers from Stanford University, North Carolina State University, Texas A&M, Oklahoma State University, University of Science and Technology at Beijing, and TU Delft.
MERL presented research (Chakrabarty, Danielson, Wang) on constraint-enforcing output-tracking with approximate dynamic programming for servomotor systems.
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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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