- Date: July 11, 2014
Where: R&D Magazine
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - A team with members from MERL, ATC, and Meiden received an R&D 100 award for its work on Mitsubishi Electric's MELFA-3D Vision system for industrial robot arms. This system completely automates bin picking a task for picking up parts that are randomly placed in a bin and aligning their poses for assembly processes.
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- Date: July 1, 2014
Where: IEEE International Wireless Symposium (IWS) Brief - Rui Ma has joined the Technical Program Committee for the 2015 IEEE International Wireless Symposium and will act as Sub-committee Chair for power amplifier design and organize a workshop on GaN.
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- Date: June 12, 2014
Where: IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques Society Brief - Rui Ma has been accepted as a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE
Microwave Theory & Techniques Society (Boston Section).
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- Date: June 10, 2014
Where: European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC)
MERL Contacts: Kieran Parsons; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Four papers from the Optical Communications team have been accepted for publication and presentation at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) to be held in Cannes, France in September 2014. The papers relate to high-dimensional modulation, signal processing and coding for coherent optical links.
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- Date: May 10, 2014
Where: REVERB Workshop
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric's submission to the REVERB workshop achieved the second best performance among all participating institutes. The team included Yuuki Tachioka and Tomohiro Narita of MELCO in Japan, and Shinji Watanabe and Felix Weninger of MERL. The challenge addresses automatic speech recognition systems that are robust against varying room acoustics.
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- Date: June 6, 2014
Where: Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC)
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino has accepted the invitation to give a talk on coded modulation formats with optimized constellations in Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC 2015).
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- Date: May 12, 2014 - May 14, 2014
Where: Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA)
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA 2014), held in Nancy, France, in May 2014.
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- Date: May 1, 2014
Where: IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - John R. Hershey is Co-Chair of the GlobalSIP 2014 Symposium on Machine Learning.
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- Date: May 1, 2014
Awarded to: Dehong Liu and Petros T. Boufounos
Awarded for: "Synthetic Aperture Imaging Using a Randomly Steered Spotlight"
Awarded by: IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - Dehong Liu and Petros T. Boufounos are the recipients of the the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society 2014 Symposium Prize Paper Award for their paper "Synthetic Aperture Imaging Using a Randomly Steered Spotlight," presented at IGARSS 2013 (TR2013-070).
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- Date: March 11, 2014
Awarded to: Yuuki Tachioka
Awarded for: "Effectiveness of discriminative approaches for speech recognition under noisy environments on the 2nd CHiME Challenge"
Awarded by: Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka received the Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award from the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ) for "effectiveness of discriminative approaches for speech recognition under noisy environments on the 2nd CHiME Challenge", which was based on joint work with MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey.
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- Date: March 1, 2014
Where: IEEE Signal Processing Society
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - John R. Hershey is Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Signal Processing Techniques for Assisted Listening of the IEEE Signal Processing.
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- Date: February 15, 2014
Where: Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC)
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - David S. Millar has been elected to the 2015 OFC Technical Committee for Digital electronic subsystems and transceivers.
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- Date: February 11, 2014
Where: IEEE Signal Processing Letters
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos Brief - Petros Boufounos was appointed as a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
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- Date: January 1, 2014
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Jonathan Le Roux, Shinji Watanabe and John R. Hershey have been elected for 3-year terms to Technical Committees of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Jonathan has been elected to the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (AASP-TC), and Shinji and John to the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SL-TC). Members of the Speech & Audio team now together hold four TC positions, as John also serves on the AASP-TC.
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- Date: February 13, 2014
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has developed energy loss-reduction technology that uses algorithms for fast analysis of three-phase electricity developed by MERL to establish optimal coordination of power-distribution grids for reductions in energy loss and power-generation costs. The technology was achieved under Mitsubishi Electric's Smart Grid Demonstration Project.
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- Date: February 13, 2014
MERL Contact: Matthew Brand Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced its development of advanced optimization algorithms and high-speed calculation methods aimed at optimizing the performance of three practical systems: laser-processing machines for high-speed cutting of sheet metal using the shortest possible trajectories, moon probes achieved with minimized fuel consumption, and particle beam therapies for prompt medical treatments.
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- Date: February 10, 2014
MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation demonstrated an ultra-simple HMI for in-car device operation using algorithms developed by MERL to predict user actions and destinations.
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- Date: Monday, January 13, 2014 - Friday, January 17, 2014
Location: San Jose, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 107th MPEG meeting to be held in San Jose, CA, in January 2014. MERL researcher Anthony Vetro serves as Head of the US Delegation to MPEG.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, November 6, 2013; 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MIT, Kiva room @CSAIL
MERL Contact: Matthew Brand Brief - Every year, MIT neighbor Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs hires 40-60 talented and motivated graduate students for summer internships in CS/EE-oriented research projects, aimed at real-world impact and high-quality publications. Join us for our kick-off recruiting reception at the Kiva/Patel room Wednesday 1-3pm. There will be a short overview of current research areas, confections, and MERL researchers on hand to discuss research opportunities. .
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- Date & Time: Thursday, October 24, 2013; 8:45 AM - 5:00 PM
Location: Columbia University
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - SANE 2013, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 24, 2013 at Columbia University, in New York City.
A follow-up to SANE 2012 held in October 2012 at MERL in Cambridge, MA, this year's SANE will be held in conjunction with the WASPAA workshop, held October 20-23 in upstate New York. WASPAA attendees are welcome and encouraged to attend SANE.
SANE 2013 will feature invited speakers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community. It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers.
SANE 2013 is organized by Prof. Dan Ellis (Columbia University), Jonathan Le Roux (MERL) and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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- Date & Time: Friday, October 18, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Shreyas Sundaram, University of Waterloo Abstract 
This talk will describe a method to stabilize a plant with a network of resource-constrained wireless nodes. As opposed to traditional networked control schemes where the nodes simply route information to and from a dedicated controller, our approach treats the network itself as the controller. Specifically, we formulate a strategy where each node repeatedly updates its state to be a linear combination of the states of neighboring nodes. We show that this causes the entire network to behave as a linear dynamical system, with sparsity constraints imposed by the network topology. We provide a numerical design procedure to determine the appropriate linear combinations for each node so that the transmissions of the nodes closest to the actuators are stabilizing. We also make connections to decentralized control theory and the concept of fixed modes to provide topological conditions under which stabilization is possible. We show that this "Wireless Control Network" requires low computational and communication overhead, simplifies transmission scheduling, and enables compositional design. We also consider the issue of security in this control scheme. Using structured system theory, we show that a certain number of malicious or misbehaving nodes can be detected and identified provided that the connectivity of the network is sufficiently high.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, October 17, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Laurent Daudet, Paris Diderot University, France
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract 
In acoustics, one may wish to acquire a wavefield over a whole spatial domain, while we can only make point measurements (ie, with microphones). Even with few sources, this remains a difficult problem because of reverberation, which can be hard to characterize. This can be seen as a sampling / interpolation problem, and it raises a number of interesting questions: how many sample points are needed, where to choose the sampling points, etc. In this presentation, we will review some case studies, in 2D (vibrating plates) and 3D (room acoustics), with numerical and experimental data, where we have developed sparse models, possibly with additional 'structures', based on a physical modeling of the acoustic field. These type of models are well suited to reconstruction techniques known as compressed sensing. These principles can also be used for sub-nyquist optical imaging : we will show preliminary experimental results of a new compressive imager, remarkably simple in its principle, using a multiply scattering medium.
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- Date & Time: Friday, October 4, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Goksel Dedeoglu, Texas Instruments
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract 
There are growing needs to accelerate computer vision algorithms on embedded processors for wide-ranging equipment including mobile phones, network cameras, robots, and automotive safety systems. In our Vision R&D group, we conduct various projects to understand how the vision requirements can be best addressed on Digital Signal Processors (DSP), where the compute bottlenecks are, and how we should evolve our hardware & software architectures to meet our customers' future needs. Towards this end, we build prototypes wherein we design and optimize embedded software for real-world application performance and robustness. In this talk, I will provide examples of vision problems that we have recently tackled.
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- Date: September 26, 2013
Awarded to: Jonathan Le Roux
Awarded for: "A new non-negative dynamical system for speech and audio modeling"
Awarded by: Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
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- Date & Time: Friday, September 6, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Davide M. Raimondo, University of Pavia, Italy
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract 
Although there are many fault diagnosis algorithms available, there has been very little work on the design or modification of control inputs with the aim of increasing the detectability and isolability of faults. The use of such inputs has clear potential for overcoming a central difficulty in fault detection, which is to distinguish the effects of faults from those of disturbances, process uncertainties, etc. Accordingly, the use of active inputs could be a transformative technology in industry, provided that such inputs can be computed reliably and efficiently.
This presentation discusses new methods for computing active inputs that guarantee that the input-output data of a process will be sufficient to correctly identify a fault from a given library of possible faults. This problem is inherently nonconvex and has a combinatorial dependence on the number of faults considered. To address this, a new formulation is considered, along with related approximations, that is amenable to efficient solution using standard optimization packages (e.g. CPLEX). The theoretical contributions combine ideas from reachability analysis, set-based computations, and optimization theory to exploit detailed problem structure and thereby manage the problem complexity. Comparisons with an existing method show that the proposed formulation provides a dramatic reduction in the required computational effort.
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