- Date: August 23, 2012
Where: IFAC Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Conference (NMPC)
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
Brief - The paper "An Industry Perspective on MPC in Large Volumes Applications: Potential Benefits and Open Challenges" by Di Cairano, S. was presented at the IFAC Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Conference (NMPC).
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- Date: August 19, 2012
Where: International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (SENSORCOMM)
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Philip V. Orlik; Jianlin Guo
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Loop-Free Routing in Low-Power and Lossy Networks" by Guo, J., Han, C., Orlik, P., Zhang, J. and Ishibashi, K. was presented at the International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (SENSORCOMM).
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- Date & Time: Friday, August 17, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Hiroshi Kawasaki, Kagoshima University
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - In this talk, I will introduce an overview of my research projects on 3D shape acquisition of moving object. The talk mainly focuses on two parts, the first one is about our 3D shape acquisition technique using projector and camera system and the second is entire shape acquisition using multi-view pro-cam system. I also briefly cover the following topics:
-- Theory of shape from coplanarity technique
-- Texture recovery method on pro-cam system
-- Future plan on medical application of our scanner
Those researches are jointly researched by Prof. Katushi Ikeuchi (Univ. of Tokyo), Prof. Ryo Furukawa (Hiroshima city Univ) and Prof. Ryusuke Sagawa (AIST).
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- Date: August 15, 2012
Where: International Workshops APPROX/RANDOM
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - The paper "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?: Sublinear Fourier Sampling Off the Grid" by Boufounos, P., Cevher, V., Gilbert, A.C., Li, Y. and Strauss, M.J. was presented at the International Workshops APPROX/RANDOM.
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- Date: August 13, 2012
Where: AIAA/AAS Astrodynamics Specialist Conference
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - The paper "Efficient Estimation and Uncertainty Quantification in Space Mission Dynamics" by Grover, P. and Sato, Y. was presented at the AIAA/AAS Astrodynamics Specialist Conference.
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- Date: August 12, 2012
Where: SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Analysis of 3D and Multiview Extensions of the Emerging HEVC Standard" by Vetro, A. and Tian, D. was presented at the SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, August 7, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Julius Kusuma, Schlumberger-Doll Research
MERL Host: Petros T. Boufounos Abstract - The oilfield is a rich area for research and engineering in communication and signal processing. Communication over non-standard channels, using constrained sources, noisy environments, and limited computational and energy resources, are some of the key challenges in this domain. In this talk I will give an introduction first on the role of science and technology, in particular communication and signal processing, in the oilfield. Due to its unique role in the industry, Schlumberger has a rich variety of communication systems over EM wireless, wired, acoustic, and even fluid pressure channels.
In this talk we give a brief tour of some of the state-of-the-art and showcase how technology has revolutionized the practice of the industry, enabling innovations such as horizontal drilling, logging-while-drilling, and well-placement. At the same time, we give a tutorial on how the lifecycle of a reservoir is managed, including imaging, drilling, logging, sampling, testing, and completing. Throughout, we will show how communication has revolutionized the practice in the industry.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Prashant Mehta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MERL Host: Scott A. Bortoff Abstract - In my talk, I will present a self-contained introduction to nonlinear filtering, and describe some recent developments. Specifically, I will introduce the feedback particle filter and show how it admits an innovations error-based feedback control structure. The control is chosen so that the posterior distribution of any particle matches the posterior distribution of the true state given the observations. The subject of my talk is a new formulation of nonlinear filter (for Bayesian inference) that is based on concepts from optimal control and mean-field game theory. Nonlinear filtering is important to many applications in engineering, biology, economics, atmospheric sciences and neuroscience. Several applications will be described to illustrate the theoretical concepts.
This is joint work with Tao Yang and Sean Meyn at the University of Illinois.
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- Date & Time: Friday, July 27, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Mingyuan Zhou, Duke University
MERL Host: Dehong Liu Abstract - Bayesian nonparametrics, using stochastic processes as prior distributions, is a relatively young and rapidly growing research area in statistics and machine learning. In this talk, we first briefly review completely random measures, a family of pure-jump non-negative stochastic processes that are simple to construct and amenable for posterior computation. We then present nonparametric Bayesian latent variable models based on the beta process, Bernoulli process, gamma process, Poisson process, and in particular, the negative binomial process. Specifically, for continuous data, we discuss dictionary learning with the beta-Bernoulli process and dependent hierarchical beta process, and for count data, we present the beta-negative binomial process and Poisson factor analysis. Furthermore, we discuss how the seeming disjoint count and mixture modelings can be united under the negative binomial processes framework, providing new opportunities to build mixture and hierarchical mixture models with better data fitting, more efficient inference and more flexible model constructions. We show successful applications of our nonparametric Bayesian latent variable models to image processing, topic modeling and count data analysis.
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- Date: July 24, 2012
Where: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
MERL Contact: Ye Wang
Research Area: Information Security
Brief - The article "A Theoretical Analysis of Authentication, Privacy, and Reusability Across Secure Biometric Systems" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Draper, S.C. and Ishwar, P. was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
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- Date: July 24, 2012
Where: International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control
MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
Research Area: Control
Brief - The article "Model Predictive Control Approach for Guidance of Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Maneuvering" by Di Cairano, S., Park, H. and Kolmanovsky, I. was published in International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control.
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- Date: July 22, 2012
Where: IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Petros T. Boufounos
Research Areas: Digital Video, Computational Sensing
Brief - The paper "Pan-Sharpening with Multi-scale Wavelet Dictionary" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. was presented at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS).
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- Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012
Speaker: Rick Vaccaro, University of Rhode Island
MERL Host: Scott A. Bortoff Abstract - The ability to directly specify the closed-loop poles of a multivariable control system is a major benefit of pole-placement algorithms for calculating state-feedback and observer gains. The drawback of these algorithms is the lack of any guarantee on the stability robustness of the resulting control system. The optimal control approach for calculating state-feedback gains (LQR) has a certain guaranteed robustness, but adding an observer (i.e. Kalman filter, LQG) can result in arbitrarily poor robustness. In this talk, a new pole-placement approach is introduced for calculating state-feedback and observer gains. The new approach optimizes robustness and gives impressive results, particularly for output feedback, observer-based control systems.
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- Date: July 16, 2012
Where: International Refrigeration and Air conditioning Conference at Purdue
MERL Contacts: Christopher R. Laughman; Daniel N. Nikovski Brief - The papers "Fast Refrigerant Property Calculations Using Interpolation-Based Methods" by Laughman, C.R., Zhao, Y. and Nikovski, D. and "Extremum Seeking Control for Energy Optimization of Vapor Compression Systems" by Burns, D.J. and Laughman, C. were presented at the International Refrigeration and Air conditioning Conference at Purdue.
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- Date & Time: Monday, July 16, 2012; 2:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Karl Iagnemma, Director, MIT Robotic Mobility Group
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract - Operator error is a significant factor in a majority of manned and unmanned vehicle accidents. In this talk, a framework for semi-autonomous vehicle accident avoidance will be presented that has been shown to effectively mitigate collisions caused by operator error. The framework analyzes sensor data (from vision and/or LIDAR data) to identify "no go" regions in the environment, and automatically synthesize constraints on vehicle position. An optimal trajectory and associated control inputs are then found via linear or nonlinear model predictive control. The "threat" to the vehicle is quantified from various metrics computed over the optimal trajectory. A number of approaches for arbitrating between operator and control system authority, based on the predicted threat, will be discussed. Extensive simulation and experimental testing will be described for both manned and unmanned scenarios. Future directions in threat assessment and semi-autonomous control, based on the integration of vision-based sensing and active steering control, will also be discussed.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, July 10, 2012; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Prof Vineet Kamat, University of Michigan
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - This talk will present ongoing research at the University of Michigan Laboratory for Interactive Visualization in Engineering (LIVE) that is exploring applications of mobile pervasive computing and visualization in design, engineering, and construction. Findings from three specific research projects will be presented: Interactive Visualization of Construction Operations in Mobile Outdoor Augmented Reality; Rapid Building Damage Evaluation using Augmented Reality and Structural Simulation; and Location-Aware Contextual Information Access and Retrieval for Rapid On-Site Decision Making. In each case, the development of fundamental algorithms, their implementation as reusable and modular software, and their implementation in the engineering applications will be described.
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- Date: July 9, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
Research Area: Information Security
Brief - The paper "A Distance-sensitive Attribute Based Cryptosystem for Privacy-Preserving Querying" by Sun, W. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME).
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- Date & Time: Friday, July 6, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Zixiang Xiong, Texas A&M University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - Driven by a host of emerging applications, distributed source coding has assumed renewed interest in the past decade. Although the Slepian-Wolf theorem has been known for almost 40 years and progresses have been made recently on the rate region of quadratic Gaussian two-terminal source coding, finding the sum-rate bound of quadratic Gaussian multiterminal source coding with more than two terminals is still an open problem. In this talk, I'll briefly go over existing results on distributed source coding problems before describing a set of new results we obtained recently.
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- Date: Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Speaker: Prof. Volkan Cevher, EPFL
MERL Host: Petros T. Boufounos Abstract - Many natural and man-made signals exhibit a few degrees of freedom relative to their dimension due to natural parameterizations or constraints. The inherent low-dimensional structure of such signals are mathematically modeled via combinatorial and geometric concepts, such as sparsity, unions-of-subspaces, or spectral sets, and are now revolutionizing the way we address linear inverse problems from incomplete data.
In this talk, we describe a set of structured sparse models for constrained linear inverse problems that feature exact and epsilon-approximate projections in polynomial time. We pay particular attention to the sparsity models based on matroids, multi-knapsack, and clustering as well as spectrally constrained models. We then study sparse projections onto convex sets, such as the (general) simplex, and ell-1,2,inf balls. Finally, we describe a hybrid optimization framework which explicitly leverages these non-convex models along with additional convex constraints to obtain better recovery performance in compressive sensing, learn interpretable sparse densities from finite samples, and improved sparse Markowitzs portfolios with better return/cost performance.
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- Date: July 1, 2012
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Toshiaki Koike-Akino Brief - The papers "Rateless Feedback Codes" by Sorensen, J.H., Koike-Akino, T. and Orlik, P. and "Ripple Design of LT Codes for AWGN Channel" by Sorensen, J.H., Koike-Akino, T., Orlik, P., Ostergaard, J. and Popovski, P. were presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).
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- Date & Time: Friday, June 29, 2012; 2:30 PM
Speaker: Prof. Marc Pollefeys, ETH Zurich and UNC Chapel Hill
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - One of the fundamental problems of computer vision is to extract 3D shape and motion from images. This can be achieved when a scene or object is observed from different viewpoints or over a period of time. First, we will discuss image-based 3D modeling and localization in large environments, e.g. urban 3D reconstruction from vehicle-borne cameras and (geo)localization from mobile-phone images. In this context, we will discuss some of the challenges an opportunities offered by symmetries of architectural structures. We will also discuss how changes in an urban environment can be detected from images, leading to the possibility to efficiently acquire 4D models. In addition to explicit 4D modeling of an event, we'll consider the possibility to perform interactive video-based rendering from casually captured videos.
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- Date: June 28, 2012
Where: International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS)
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The paper "Bayesian Networks for Matcher Composition in Automatic Schema Matching" by Nikovski, D., Esenther, A., Ye, X., Shiba, M. and Takayama, S. was presented at the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS).
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, June 27, 2012; 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location: Montreal, Canada
MERL Contact: Scott A. Bortoff Brief - In this session, MERL researcher Scott Bortoff will describe Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO)'s businesses, discuss mechatronics and controls research at MERL and describe opportunities for collaboration and employment. Areas of current research interest include optimal control especially of nonlinear and hybrid systems, model predictive control, nonlinear dynamical systems, and modeling and control of multi-physical heterogeneous systems. Research projects at MERL typically address fundamental problems that are industrially-motivated, and involve application of advanced control theory or dynamical systems theory to MELCO products resulting in new technology that is transferred into the corporate R&D laboratories for subsequent product development. Areas of current application include elevators, HVAC, power generation and distribution, satellites, robot manipulation, servo systems and laser processing systems. MERL has a tradition of open collaboration and hosts visitors and interns especially during the summer months when our population increases by 50%. Researchers and students who have an interest in collaboration, visits, sabbatical leaves or permanent employment are invited.
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- Date: June 27, 2012
Where: American Control Conference (ACC)
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Scott A. Bortoff Brief - The papers "Further Developments and Applications of Network Reference Governor for Constrained Systems" by Di Cairano, S. and Kolmanovsky, I.V. and "Load Positioning in the Presence of Base Vibrations" by Shilpiekandula, V., Bortoff, S.A., Barnwell, J.C. and El Rifai, K. were presented at the American Control Conference (ACC).
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- Date: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - Friday, June 29, 2012
Location: Montreal, Canada Brief - MERL is a sponsor for ACC 2012, the 2012 American Control Conference.
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