News & Events

60 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.


  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Ufuk Topcu presents talk titled Autonomous systems in the intersection of formal methods, learning, and control
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 26, 2022; 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Ufuk Topcu, The University of Texas at Austin
    MERL Host: Abraham P. Vinod
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
    Abstract
    • Autonomous systems are emerging as a driving technology for countlessly many applications. Numerous disciplines tackle the challenges toward making these systems trustworthy, adaptable, user-friendly, and economical. On the other hand, the existing disciplinary boundaries delay and possibly even obstruct progress. I argue that the nonconventional problems that arise in designing and verifying autonomous systems require hybrid solutions in the intersection of learning, formal methods, and controls. I will present examples of such hybrid solutions in the context of learning in sequential decision-making processes. These results offer novel means for effectively integrating physics-based, contextual, or structural prior knowledge into data-driven learning algorithms. They improve data efficiency by several orders of magnitude and generalizability to environments and tasks that the system had not experienced previously.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Gianmario Pellegrino presents talk titled Design, Identification and Simulation of PM Synchronous Machines for Traction
    Date & Time: Friday, October 14, 2022; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Gianmario Pellegrino, Politecnico di Tornio, Italy
    Research Areas: Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
    Abstract
    • This seminar presents a comprehensive design and simulation procedure for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (PMSMs) for traction application. The design of heavily saturated traction PMSMs is a multidisciplinary engineering challenge that CAD software suites struggle to grasp, whereas design equations are way too approximated for the purpose. This tutorial will present the design toolchain of SyR-e, where magnetic and structural design equations are fast-FEA corrected for an insightful initial design, later FEA calibrated with free or commercial FEA tools. One e-motor will be designed from zero referring to the specs and size of the Tesla Model 3 rear-axle e-motor. The circuital model of one motor with inverter and discrete-time control will be automatically generated, in Simulink and PLECS, with accessible torque control source code, for simulation of healthy and faulty conditions, ready for real-time implementation (e.g. HiL).
  •  
  •  TALK    A Tunable Control/Learning Framework for Autonomous Systems
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 13, 2022; 1:30pm-2:30pm
    Speaker: Prof. Shaoshuai Mou, Purdue University
    MERL Host: Yebin Wang
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
    Abstract
    • Modern society has been relying more and more on engineering advance of autonomous systems, ranging from individual systems (such as a robotic arm for manufacturing, a self-driving car, or an autonomous vehicle for planetary exploration) to cooperative systems (such as a human-robot team, swarms of drones, etc). In this talk we will present our most recent progress in developing a fundamental framework for learning and control in autonomous systems. The framework comes from a differentiation of Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle and is able to provide a unified solution to three classes of learning/control tasks, i.e. adaptive autonomy, inverse optimization, and system identification. We will also present applications of this framework into human-autonomy teaming, especially in enabling an autonomous system to take guidance from human operators, which is usually sparse and vague.
  •  
  •  EVENT    SANE 2022 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date: Thursday, October 6, 2022
    Location: Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA
    MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2022, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, was held on Thursday October 6, 2022 in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

      It was the 9th edition in the SANE series of workshops, which started in 2012 and was held every year alternately in Boston and New York until 2019. Since the first edition, the audience has grown to a record 200 participants and 45 posters in 2019. After a 2-year hiatus due to the pandemic, SANE returned with an in-person gathering of 140 students and researchers.

      SANE 2022 featured invited talks by seven leading researchers from the Northeast: Rupal Patel (Northeastern/VocaliD), Wei-Ning Hsu (Meta FAIR), Scott Wisdom (Google), Tara Sainath (Google), Shinji Watanabe (CMU), Anoop Cherian (MERL), and Chuang Gan (UMass Amherst/MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab). It also featured a lively poster session with 29 posters.

      SANE 2022 was co-organized by Jonathan Le Roux (MERL), Arnab Ghoshal (Apple), John Hershey (Google), and Shinji Watanabe (CMU). SANE remained a free event thanks to generous sponsorship by Bose, Google, MERL, and Microsoft.

      Slides and videos of the talks will be released on the SANE workshop website.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Chuang Gan presents talk titled Learning to Perceive Physical Scenes from Multi-Sensory Data
    Date & Time: Tuesday, September 6, 2022; 12:00 PM EDT
    Speaker: Chuang Gan, UMass Amherst & MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Human sensory perception of the physical world is rich and multimodal and can flexibly integrate input from all five sensory modalities -- vision, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. However, in AI, attention has primarily focused on visual perception. In this talk, I will introduce my efforts in connecting vision with sound, which will allow machine perception systems to see objects and infer physics from multi-sensory data. In the first part of my talk, I will introduce a. self-supervised approach that could learn to parse images and separate the sound sources by watching and listening to unlabeled videos without requiring additional manual supervision. In the second part of my talk, I will show we may further infer the underlying causal structure in 3D environments through visual and auditory observations. This enables agents to seek the sound source of repeating environmental sound (e.g., alarm) or identify what object has fallen, and where, from an intermittent impact sound.
  •  
  •  AWARD    Marcus Greiff receives Outstanding Student Paper Award at CCTA 2022
    Date: August 25, 2022
    Awarded to: Marcus Greiff
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
    Brief
    • Marcus Greiff, a Visiting Research Scientist at MERL, was awarded one of three outstanding student paper awards at the IEEE CCTA 2022 conference for his paper titled "Quadrotor Control on SU(2)xR3 with SLAM Integration". The award was given for originality, clarity, and potential impact on practical applications of control. The work presents a complete UAV control system design, facilitating autonomous supermarket inventorying without the need for external motion capture systems. A video of the experiments is on YouTube, including both simulations and real-time examples.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL congratulates Prof. Alex Waibel on receiving 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award
    Date: August 22, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • IEEE has announced that the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Prof. Alex Waibel (CMU/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), “For pioneering contributions to spoken language translation and supporting technologies.” Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), which has become the new sponsor of this prestigious award in 2022, extends our warmest congratulations to Prof. Waibel.

      MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Dr. Chiori Hori, who worked with Dr. Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University and collaborated with him as part of national projects on speech summarization and translation, comments on his invaluable contributions to the field: “He has contributed not only to the invention of groundbreaking technology in speech and spoken language processing but also to the promotion of an abundance of research projects through international research consortiums by linking American, European, and Asian research communities. Many of his former laboratory members and collaborators are now leading R&D in the AI field.”

      The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing. This award has recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields. MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of speech and audio processing through its sponsorship of this award.
  •  
  •  AWARD    ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference 2022 Best Paper Award nominee
    Date: July 14, 2022
    Awarded to: Weidong Cao, Mouhacine Benosman, Xuan Zhang, and Rui Ma
    Research Area: Artificial Intelligence
    Brief
    • The Conference committee of the 59th Design Automation Conference has chosen MERL's paper entitled 'Domain Knowledge-Infused Deep Learning for Automated Analog/RF Circuit Parameter Optimization', as a DAC Best Paper Award nominee. The committee evaluated both manuscript and submitted presentation recording, and has chosen MERL's paper as one of six nominees for this prestigious award. Decisions were based on the submissions’ innovation, impact and exposition.
  •  
  •  AWARD    International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS) 2022 Openedges Award
    Date: June 15, 2022
    Awarded to: Yuxiang Sun, Mouhacine Benosman, Rui Ma.
    Research Area: Artificial Intelligence
    Brief
    • The committee of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS) 2022, has selected MERL's paper entitled 'GaN Distributed RF Power Amplifier Automation Design with Deep Reinforcement Learning' as a winner of the AICAS 2022 Openedges Award.

      In this paper MERL researchers propose a novel design automation methodology based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), for wide-band non-uniform distributed RF power amplifiers, known for their high dimensional design challenges.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL researchers win ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at 2022 American Control Conference
    Date: June 8, 2022
    Where: 2022 American Control Conference
    MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
    Brief
    • Researchers from EPFL (Wenjie Xu, Colin Jones) and EMPA (Bratislav Svetozarevic), in collaboration with MERL researchers Ankush Chakrabarty and Chris Laughman, recently won the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at the 2022 American Control Conference for their work on "VABO: Violation-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Closed-Loop Performance Optimization with Unmodeled Constraints" out of 19 nominations and 3 finalists. The paper describes a data-driven framework for optimizing the performance of constrained control systems by systematically re-evaluating how cautiously/aggressively one should explore the search space to avoid sustained, large-magnitude constraint violations while tolerating small violations, and demonstrates these methods on a physics-based model of a vapor compression cycle.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented 5 papers and an invited workshop talk at ICRA 2022
    Date: May 23, 2022 - May 27, 2022
    Where: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Pedro Miraldo; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) that was held in Philadelphia from May 23-27, 2022. The papers covered a broad range of topics from manipulation, tactile sensing, planning and multi-agent control. The invited talk was presented in the "Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Work of the Future" which covered some of the work done by MERL researchers on collaborative robotic assembly. The workshop was co-organized by MERL, Mitsubishi Electric Automation's North America Development Center (NADC), and MIT.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL presenting 8 papers at ICASSP 2022
    Date: May 22, 2022 - May 27, 2022
    Where: Singapore
    MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Tim K. Marks; Philip V. Orlik; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL researchers are presenting 8 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP), which is being held in Singapore from May 22-27, 2022. A week of virtual presentations also took place earlier this month.

      Topics to be presented include recent advances in speech recognition, audio processing, scene understanding, computational sensing, and classification.

      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.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL Scientists Presenting 5 Papers at IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2022
    Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
    Where: Seoul, Korea
    MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL Connectivity & Information Processing Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2022, held in Seoul Korea on May 16-20, 2022. Topics presented include recent advancements in communications technologies, deep learning methods, and quantum machine learning (QML). Presentation videos are also found on our YouTube channel. In addition, K. J. Kim organized "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks Workshop" at the conference.

      IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society’s flagship conferences (ICC and Globecom). Each year, close to 2,000 attendees from over 70 countries attend IEEE ICC to take advantage of a program which consists of exciting keynote session, robust technical paper sessions, innovative tutorials and workshops, and engaging industry sessions. This 5-day event is known for bringing together audiences from both industry and academia to learn about the latest research and innovations in communications and networking technology, share ideas and best practices, and collaborate on future projects.
  •  
  •  NEWS    Toshiaki Koike-Akino gave an invited lecture to USPTO on advanced photonics
    Date: May 4, 2022
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Optimization, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Toshiaki Koike-Akino gave an invited lecture on advanced photonic devices at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Technology Fair on May 4, 2022. Topics of the lecture included the recent progress of applied artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for optical systems, nano-photonic devices, and quantum technology. During the 2-hour interactive online presentation, he lectured to more than 200 patent examiner participants.

      USPTO Tech Fair Organizer mentioned:
      "Thank you very much for representing Advanced Photonic Devices at this year’s Technology Center 2800 Virtual Tech Fair held May 4th, 2022. Tech Fair is an important part of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Examiner Technical Training Program (PETTP). Having a scientifically well-trained examiner workforce and ensuring the quality, consistency, and reliability of issued patents are top priorities at the USPTO. The PETTP is designed to achieve those priorities by giving examiners direct access to technical experts who are willing to share their knowledge about prior art and industry standards for both emerging and established technologies. Experts like yourself help to maintain our high quality of patent examination by keeping examiners updated on technologies and innovations pertinent to their field of examination.
      We very much appreciate your efforts, time, and contributions."
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Michael Posa presents talk titled Hybrid robotics and implicit learning
    Date & Time: Tuesday, May 3, 2022; 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Michael Posa, University of Pennsylvania
    MERL Host: Devesh K. Jha
    Research Areas: Control, Optimization, Robotics
    Abstract
    • Machine learning has shown incredible promise in robotics, with some notable recent demonstrations in manipulation and sim2real transfer. These results, however, require either an accurate a priori model (for simulation) or a large amount of data. In contrast, my lab is focused on enabling robots to enter novel environments and then, with minimal time to gather information, accomplish complex tasks. In this talk, I will argue that the hybrid or contact-driven nature of real-world robotics, where a robot must safely and quickly interact with objects, drives this high data requirement. In particular, the inductive biases inherent in standard learning methods fundamentally clash with the non-differentiable physics of contact-rich robotics. Focusing on model learning, or system identification, I will show both empirical and theoretical results which demonstrate that contact stiffness leads to poor training and generalization, leading to some healthy skepticism of simulation experiments trained on artificially soft environments. Fortunately, implicit learning formulations, which embed convex optimization problems, can dramatically reshape the optimization landscape for these stiff problems. By carefully reasoning about the roles of stiffness and discontinuity, and integrating non-smooth structures, we demonstrate dramatically improved learning performance. Within this family of approaches, ContactNets accurately identifies the geometry and dynamics of a six-sided cube bouncing, sliding, and rolling across a surface from only a handful of sample trajectories. Similarly, a piecewise-affine hybrid system with thousands of modes can be identified purely from state transitions. Time permitting, I'll discuss how these learned models can be deployed for control via recent results in real-time, multi-contact MPC.
  •  
  •  NEWS    MERL's Yanting Ma completed the 2022 Boston Marathon
    Date: April 18, 2022
    Where: Boston, MA
    MERL Contact: Yanting Ma
    Brief
    • Researcher, Yanting Ma, qualified for and completed the Boston Marathon on Monday April 18th. We would like to congratulate her on achieving this personal goal in an impressive time of 3:18.48!!
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Sebastien Gros presents talk titled RLMPC: An Ideal Combination of Formal Optimal Control and Reinforcement Learning?
    Date & Time: Tuesday, April 12, 2022; 11:00 AM EDT
    Speaker: Sebastien Gros, NTNU
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
    Abstract
    • Reinforcement Learning (RL), similarly to many AI-based techniques, is currently receiving a very high attention. RL is most commonly supported by classic Machine Learning techniques, i.e. typically Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). While there are good motivations for using DNNs in RL, there are also significant drawbacks. The lack of “explainability” of the resulting control policies, and the difficulty to provide guarantees on their closed-loop behavior (safety, stability) makes DNN-based policies problematic in many applications. In this talk, we will discuss an alternative approach to support RL, via formal optimal control tools based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). This approach alleviates the issues detailed above, but also presents some challenges. In this talk, we will discuss why MPC is a valid tool to support RL, and how MPC can be combined with RL (RLMPC). We will then discuss some recent results regarding this combination, the known challenges, and the kind of control applications where we believe that RLMPC will be a valuable approach.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Albert Benveniste, Benoît Caillaud, and Mathias Malandain present talk titled Exact Structural Analysis of Multimode Modelica Models
    Date & Time: Tuesday, April 5, 2022; 11:00 AM EDT
    Speaker: Albert Benveniste, Benoît Caillaud, and Mathias Malandain, Inria
    MERL Host: Scott A. Bortoff
    Research Areas: Dynamical Systems, Multi-Physical Modeling
    Abstract
    • Since its 3.3 release, Modelica offers the possibility to specify models of dynamical systems with multiple modes having different DAE-based dynamics. However, the handling of such models by the current Modelica tools is not satisfactory, with mathematically sound models yielding exceptions at runtime. In our introduction, will briefly explain why and when the approximate structural analysis implemented in current Modelica tools leads to such errors. Then we will present our multimode Pryce Sigma-method for index reduction, in which the mode-dependent Sigma-matrix is represented in a dual form, by attaching, to every valuation of the sigma_ij entry of the Sigma matrix, the predicate characterizing the set of modes in which sigma_ij takes this value. We will illustrate this multimode analysis on example, by using our IsamDAE tool. In a second part, we will complement this multimode DAE structural analysis by a new structural analysis of mode changes (and, more generally, transient modes holding for zero time). Also, mode changes often give raise to impulsive behaviors: we will present a compile-time analysis identifying such behaviors. Our structural analysis of mode changes deeply relies on nonstandard analysis, which is a mathematical framework in which infinitesimals and infinities are first class citizens.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Vincent Sitzmann presents talk titled Self-Supervised Scene Representation Learning
    Date & Time: Wednesday, March 30, 2022; 11:00 AM EDT
    Speaker: Vincent Sitzmann, MIT
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
    Abstract
    • Given only a single picture, people are capable of inferring a mental representation that encodes rich information about the underlying 3D scene. We acquire this skill not through massive labeled datasets of 3D scenes, but through self-supervised observation and interaction. Building machines that can infer similarly rich neural scene representations is critical if they are to one day parallel people’s ability to understand, navigate, and interact with their surroundings. This poses a unique set of challenges that sets neural scene representations apart from conventional representations of 3D scenes: Rendering and processing operations need to be differentiable, and the type of information they encode is unknown a priori, requiring them to be extraordinarily flexible. At the same time, training them without ground-truth 3D supervision is an underdetermined problem, highlighting the need for structure and inductive biases without which models converge to spurious explanations.

      I will demonstrate how we can equip neural networks with inductive biases that enables them to learn 3D geometry, appearance, and even semantic information, self-supervised only from posed images. I will show how this approach unlocks the learning of priors, enabling 3D reconstruction from only a single posed 2D image, and how we may extend these representations to other modalities such as sound. I will then discuss recent work on learning the neural rendering operator to make rendering and training fast, and how this speed-up enables us to learn object-centric neural scene representations, learning to decompose 3D scenes into objects, given only images. Finally, I will talk about a recent application of self-supervised scene representation learning in robotic manipulation, where it enables us to learn to manipulate classes of objects in unseen poses from only a handful of human demonstrations.
  •  
  •  NEWS    Rui Ma gives an Invited Talk on Digital Intensive PA/Transmitter for RF Communications Workshop at IMS2022
    Date: June 19, 2022
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • MERL Researcher Rui Ma will give an invited talk titled "All Digital Transmitter with GaN Switching Mode Power Amplifiers"at a technical workshop during International Microwave Symposium (IMS)2022. This IMS workshop (WSN) invites members from academia and industry to discuss the latest development activities in the area of digital-intensive power amplifiers and transmitters for RF communications.

      In addition, Dr. Rui Ma is chairing a Technical Session(We2C) on "AI/ML on RF and mmWave Applications" at IMS2022.

      IMS is the flagship annual conference of IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society(MTT-S).

      Learn more here:
      Sessions
      Workshops
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Analog CMOS Computing Chips for Fast and Energy-Efficient Solution of PDE Systems
    Date & Time: Tuesday, March 15, 2022; 1:00 PM EDT
    Speaker: Arjuna Madanayake, Florida International University
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Multi-Physical Modeling
    Abstract
    • Analog computers are making a comeback. In fact, they are taking the world by storm. After decades of “analog computing winter” that followed the invention of the digital computing paradigm in the 1940s, classical physics-based analog computers are being reconsidered for improving the computational throughput of demanding applications. The research is driven by exponential growth in transistor densities and bandwidths in the integrated circuits world, which in turn, has led to new possibilities for the creative circuit designer. Fast analog chips not only furnish communication/radar front-ends, but can also be used to accelerate mathematical operations. Most analog computer today focus on AI and machine learning. E.g., analog in-memory computing plays an exciting role in AI acceleration because linear algebra operations can be mapped efficiently to compute in memory. However, many scientific computing tasks are built on linear and non-linear partial differential equations (PDEs) that require recursive numerical PDE solution across spatial and temporal dimensions. The adoption of analog parallel processors that are built around speed vs power efficiency vs precision trade-offs available from circuitry for PDE solution require new research in computer architecture. We report on recent progress on CMOS based analog computers for solving computational electromagnetics and non-linear pressure wave equations. Our first analog computing chip was measured to be more than 400x faster than a top-of-the-line NVIDIA GPU while consuming 1000x less power for elementary computational electromagnetics computations using finite-difference time-domain scheme.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Learning Speech Representations with Multimodal Self-Supervision
    Date & Time: Tuesday, March 1, 2022; 1:00 PM EST
    Speaker: David Harwath, The University of Texas at Austin
    MERL Host: Chiori Hori
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Humans learn spoken language and visual perception at an early age by being immersed in the world around them. Why can't computers do the same? In this talk, I will describe our ongoing work to develop methodologies for grounding continuous speech signals at the raw waveform level to natural image scenes. I will first present self-supervised models capable of discovering discrete, hierarchical structure (words and sub-word units) in the speech signal. Instead of conventional annotations, these models learn from correspondences between speech sounds and visual patterns such as objects and textures. Next, I will demonstrate how these discrete units can be used as a drop-in replacement for text transcriptions in an image captioning system, enabling us to directly synthesize spoken descriptions of images without the need for text as an intermediate representation. Finally, I will describe our latest work on Transformer-based models of visually-grounded speech. These models significantly outperform the prior state of the art on semantic speech-to-image retrieval tasks, and also learn representations that are useful for a multitude of other speech processing tasks.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Beyond the First Portrait of a Black Hole
    Date & Time: Tuesday, February 15, 2022; 1:00 PM EST
    Speaker: Katie Bouman, California Institute of Technology
    MERL Host: Joshua Rapp
    Research Area: Computational Sensing
    Abstract
    • As imaging requirements become more demanding, we must rely on increasingly sparse and/or noisy measurements that fail to paint a complete picture. Computational imaging pipelines, which replace optics with computation, have enabled image formation in situations that are impossible for conventional optical imaging. For instance, the first black hole image, published in 2019, was only made possible through the development of computational imaging pipelines that worked alongside an Earth-sized distributed telescope. However, remaining scientific questions motivate us to improve this computational telescope to see black hole phenomena still invisible to us and to meaningfully interpret the collected data. This talk will discuss how we are leveraging and building upon recent advances in machine learning in order to achieve more efficient uncertainty quantification of reconstructed images as well as to develop techniques that allow us to extract the evolving structure of our own Milky Way's black hole over the course of a night, perhaps even in three dimensions.
  •  
  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Extreme optics design as a large-scale optimization problem
    Date & Time: Tuesday, February 8, 2022; 1:00 PM EST
    Speaker: Raphaël Pestourie, MIT
    MERL Host: Matthew Brand
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Optimization
    Abstract
    • Thin large-area structures with aperiodic subwavelength patterns can unleash the full power of Maxwell’s equations for focusing light and a variety of other wave transformation or optical applications. Because of their irregularity and large scale, capturing the full scattering through these devices is one of the most challenging tasks for computational design: enter extreme optics! This talk will present ways to harness the full computational power of modern large-scale optimization in order to design optical devices with thousands or millions of free parameters. We exploit various methods of domain-decomposition approximations, supercomputer-scale topology optimization, laptop-scale “surrogate” models based on Chebyshev interpolation and/or new scientific machine learning models, and other techniques to attack challenging problems: achromatic lenses that simultaneously handle many wavelengths and angles, “deep” images, hyperspectral imaging, and more.
  •  
  •  NEWS    Dr. Benosman is invited to give the mini-course in control theory at the 2022 edition of the Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control
    Date: July 5, 2022 - July 7, 2022
    Research Areas: Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems
    Brief
    • The Benelux meeting is an annual conference gathering of the scientific community of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg around systems and control. It is especially intended for PhD researchers and a number of activities are dedicated to them, including plenary talks and a mini-course.

      Dr. Benosman has been invited to give the mini-course of the 2022 edition of the conference. This course, entitled 'A hybrid approach to control: classical control theory meets machine learning theory', will be centered around the topic of safe and robust machine learning-based control.
  •