- Date: July 9, 2019
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
Research Area: Communications
Brief - MERL researchers presented an invited talk at OptElectronics and Communications Conference (OECC), held at Fukuoka, Japan. The speech focused on recent advancement of error correction coding based on polar codes and suited for hardware implementation in high-speed optical communications.
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- Date: July 10, 2019 - July 12, 2019
Where: Philadelphia
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Karl Berntorp; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Devesh K. Jha; Yebin Wang; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - At the American Control Conference, MERL presented 8 papers on subjects including model predictive control applications, estimation and motion planning for vehicles, modular control architectures, and adaptation and learning.
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- Date: June 25, 2019 - June 28, 2019
Where: Naples, Italy
MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Devesh K. Jha; Christopher R. Laughman; Daniel N. Nikovski; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
Brief - The European Control Conference is the premier control conference in Europe. This year MERL was well represented with papers on control for HVAC, machine learning for estimation and control, robot assembly, and optimization methods for control.
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- Date: July 4, 2019
Where: University of Edinburgh
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, of MERL's Data Analytics group, will deliver a keynote titled "Embedding Perfect Structures in Process Systems" in the School of Engineering at University of Edinburgh. Abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date: July 2, 2019
Where: Imperial College London
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan, of MERL's Data Analytics group, will deliver a seminar titled "Chordal Completions – Semidefinite Programming and Minimum Completions" in the Computational Optimisation Group at Imperial College London. Abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date: June 10, 2019 - June 14, 2019
Where: Paris
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Stefano Di Cairano and Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky, Dept. Aerospace Engineering, the University of Michigan, were invited to teach a class on "Predictive and Optimization Based Control for Automotive and Aerospace Application" at the 2019 International Graduate School in Control, of the European Embedded Control Institute (EECI). Every year EECI invites world renown experts to teach 21-hours class modules, mostly for PhD students but also for professionals, on selected control subjects. Stefano and Ilya's class was attended by 30 "students" from both academia and industry, from all around the world, interested in automotive and aerospace control. The module described the fundamentals of modeling and control design in automotive and aerospace through lectures, real world examples and exercises, and placed particular emphasis on techniques such as MPC, reference governors, and optimal control.
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- Date: June 12, 2019
Where: Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics – Published 22 Feb 2019
MERL Contact: Chungwei Lin
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Multi-Physical Modeling
Brief - The journal "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (PCCP)" selects a few well-received articles highlighted as HOT by the handling editor or referees. The following paper "Band Alignment in Quantum Wells from Automatically Tuned DFT+U" with MERL authors Grigory Kolesov, Chungwei Lin, Andrew Knyazev, Keisuke Kojima, Joseph Katz has been selected as a 2019 HOT Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics article, and is made free to access until the end of July 2019. This paper provides a semi-empirical methodology to compute the lattice and electronic structures of systems composed of 400+ atoms. The efficiency of this method allows for realistic simulations of interfaces between semiconductors, which is nearly impossible using the existing methods due to the extremely large degrees of freedom involved. The formalism is tested against a few established band alignments and then applied to determine the band gaps of quantum wells; the agreement is within the experimental uncertainty.
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- Date & Time: July 29, 2019; 10 AM
Where: US National Congress on Computational Mechanics 2019, in Austin Texas
MERL Contact: Mouhacine Benosman
Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
Brief - MERL researcher Mouhacine Benosman will present his work on 'Learning-based Robust Stabilization for Reduced-Order Models of 3D Boussinesq Equations' as a keynote speaker at the mini-symposium 'Data assimilation in Model Order Techniques for Computational Mechanics', during the next US National Congress on Computational Mechanics 2019, in Austin Texas.
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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- Date: February 13, 2019
Where: Tokyo, Japan
MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has developed the world's first technology capable of highly accurate multilingual speech recognition without being informed which language is being spoken. The novel technology, Seamless Speech Recognition, incorporates Mitsubishi Electric's proprietary Maisart compact AI technology and is built on a single system that can simultaneously identify and understand spoken languages. In tests involving 5 languages, the system achieved recognition with over 90 percent accuracy, without being informed which language was being spoken. When incorporating 5 more languages with lower resources, accuracy remained above 80 percent. The technology can also understand multiple people speaking either the same or different languages simultaneously. A live demonstration involving a multilingual airport guidance system took place on February 13 in Tokyo, Japan. It was widely covered by the Japanese media, with reports by all six main Japanese TV stations and multiple articles in print and online newspapers, including in Japan's top newspaper, Asahi Shimbun. The technology is based on recent research by MERL's Speech and Audio team.
Link:
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release
Media Coverage:
NHK, News (Japanese)
NHK World, News (English), video report (starting at 4'38")
TV Asahi, ANN news (Japanese)
Nippon TV, News24 (Japanese)
Fuji TV, Prime News Alpha (Japanese)
TV Tokyo, World Business Satellite (Japanese)
TV Tokyo, Morning Satellite (Japanese)
TBS, News, N Studio (Japanese)
The Asahi Shimbun (Japanese)
The Nikkei Shimbun (Japanese)
Nikkei xTech (Japanese)
Response (Japanese).
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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- Date: January 10, 2019
Where: Tokyo, Japan
MERL Contacts: Mouhacine Benosman; Philip V. Orlik
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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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