- 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: 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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- Date: June 27, 2012
Where: Optics Express
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - The article "High-order Statistical Equalizer for Nonlinearity Compensation in Dispersion-managed Coherent Optical Communications" by Koike-Akino, T., Duan, C., Parsons, K., Kojima, K., Yoshida, T., Sugihara, T. and Mizuochi, T. was published in Optics Express.
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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 & Time: Tuesday, June 26, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Min Sun, University of Michigan
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - Robust human pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision in that body part configurations are often subject to severe deformations and occlusions. Moreover, efficient pose estimation is often a desirable requirement in many applications. The trade-off between accuracy and efficiency has been explored in a large number of approaches. On the one hand, models with simple representations (like tree or star models) can be efficiently applied in pose estimation problems. However, these models are often prone to body part misclassification errors. On the other hand, models with rich representations (i.e., loopy graphical models) are theoretically more robust, but their inference complexity may increase dramatically. In this talk, we present an efficient and exact inference algorithm based on branch-and-bound to solve the human pose estimation problem on loopy graphical models. We show that our method is empirically much faster (about 74 times) than the state-of-the-art exact inference algorithm [Sontag et al. UAI'08]. By extending a state-of-the-art tree model [Sapp et al. ECCV'10] to a loopy graphical model, we show that the estimation accuracy improves for most of the body parts (especially lower arms) on popular datasets such as Buffy [Ferrari et al. CVPR'08] and Stickmen [Eichner and Ferrari BMVC'09] datasets. Our method can also be used to exactly solve most of the inference problems of Stretchable Models [Sapp et al. CVPR'11] on video sequences (which contains a few hundreds of variables) in just a few minutes. Finally, we show that the novel inference algorithm can potentially be used to solve human behavior understanding and biological computation problems.
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- Date & Time: Monday, June 25, 2012; 10:30 AM
Speaker: Prof. Toshiyuki Ohtsuka, Osaka University
MERL Host: Stefano Di Cairano Abstract - In this talk, a real-time algorithm for nonlinear model predictive control and its applications will be introduced. The continuation method is combined with an efficient linear solver GMRES to trace the time-dependent optimal solution without iterative searches. Applications of the algorithm include position control of an underactuated hovercraft, route tracking of a ship with redundant actuators, and path generation for an automobile. Automatic code generation by symbolic computation and other related topics will also be introduced.
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- Date: June 16, 2012
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Connecting the Dots in Multi-Class Classification: From Nearest Subspace to Collaborative Representation" by Chi, Y. and Porikli, F., "Decomposing Global Light Transport using Time of Flight Imaging" by Wu, D., O'Toole, M., Velten, A., Agrawal, A. and Raskar, R., "Changedetection.net: A New Change Detection Benchmark Dataset" by Goyette, N., Jodoin, P.-M., Porikli, F., Konrad, J. and Ishwar, P. and "A Theory of Multi-Layer Flat Refractive Geometry" by Agrawal, A., Ramalingam, S., Taguchi, Y. and Chari, V. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date: June 10, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
MERL Contact: Philip V. Orlik
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "Non-coherent ToA Estimation for UWB Multipath Channels using Max-eigenvalue Detection" by Shi, W., Annavajjala, R., Orlik, P.V., Molisch, A.F., Ochiari, M. and Taira, A. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
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- Date: June 4, 2012
Where: CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Offline Force Control and Feedrate Scheduling for Complex Free Form Surfaces in 5-Axis Milling" by Layegh, S.E., Erdim, H. and Lazoglu, I. was presented at the CIRP Conference on High Performance Cutting.
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- Date: June 1, 2012
Where: Computer-Aided Design
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "High Accuracy NC Milling Simulation Using Composite Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields" by Sullivan, A., Erdim, H., Perry, R.N. and Frisken, S.F. was published in Computer-Aided Design.
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- Date: May 21, 2012
Where: IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia (ISGT Asia)
MERL Contacts: Hongbo Sun; Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The paper "Two-Level State Estimation Method for Power Systems with SCADA and PMU Measurements" by Sun, H., Wang, Z. and Nikovski, D. was presented at IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia (ISGT Asia).
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- Date: May 21, 2012
Where: International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) Brief - The papers "Visualizing Set-valued Attributes in Parallel with Equal-height Histograms" by Wittenburg, K., Malizia, A., Lupo, L. and Pekhteryev, G. and "Envisioning Grid Vulnerabilities: Multi-dimensional Visualization for Electrical Grid Planning" by Romero, R., Diez, D., Wittenburg, K. and Diaz, P. were presented at the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI).
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- Date: May 14, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Voting-based Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly Using a 3D Sensor" by Choi, C., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Liu, M.-Y. and Ramalingam, S., "Convex Bricks: A New Primitive for Visual Hull Modeling and Reconstruction" by Chari, V., Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S. and "Coverage Optimized Active Learning for k - NN Classifiers" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F. and Papanikolopoulos, N. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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- Date: May 8, 2012
Where: The International Journal of Robotics Research
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The article "Fast Object Localization and Pose Estimation in Heavy Clutter for Robotic Bin Picking" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, O., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Chellappa, R. was published in The International Journal of Robotics Research.
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- Date: May 7, 2012
Where: Picture Coding Symposium (PCS)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Predictive Coding of Intra Prediction Modes for High Efficiency Video Coding" by Xu, X., Cohen, R., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. was presented at the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS).
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- Date: May 6, 2012
Where: IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC)
MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Improved and Opportunistic Interference Alignment Schemes for Multi-Cell Interference Channels" by Gou, T., Koike-Akino, T. and Orlik, P. was presented at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC).
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- Date: April 23, 2012
Where: Optics Express
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Kieran Parsons
Research Area: Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - The article "Mode-evolution-based Polarization Rotator-splitter Design via Simple Fabrication Process" by Yuan, W., Kojima, K., Wang, B., Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., Nishikawa, S. and Yagyu, E. was published in Optics Express.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, April 12, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Stefanie Jegelka, UC Berkeley
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - Graph cuts that represent pairwise Markov random fields have been a popular tool in computer vision, but they have some well-known shortcomings that arise from their locality and conditional independence assumptions. We therefore extend graph cuts to "cooperative cuts", where "cooperating" graph edges incur a lower combined cost. This cooperation is modeled by submodular functions on edges. The resulting family of global energy functions includes recent models in computer vision and also new critieria which e.g. significantly improve image segmentation results for finely structured objects and for images with variation in contrast. While "minimum cooperative cut" is NP-hard, the underlying indirect submodularity and the graph structure enable efficient approximations.
In the second part of the talk, I will switch topics and briefly address Hilbert space embeddings of distributions. With the kernel trick, such embeddings help generalize clustering objectives to consider higher-order moments of distributions instead of merely point locations.
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- Date: April 1, 2012
Where: European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "SAR Despeckle Filtering by Sparse Coding on Affinity Nets (SCAN)" by Porikli, F., Sundaresan, R. and Suwa, K. was presented at the European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR).
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- Date: April 1, 2012
Where: Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Variable Focus Video: Reconstructing Depth and Video for Dynamic Scenes" by Shroff, N., Veeraraghavan, A., Taguchi, Y., Tuzel, O., Agrawal, A. and Chellappa, R. was presented at the Computational Photography (ICCP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on.
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- Date: March 31, 2012
Where: International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML)
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Latent Dirichlet Reallocation for Term Swapping" by Heaukulani, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML).
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- Date & Time: Friday, March 30, 2012; 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: Kyoto, Japan
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro co-organized a Special Session of ICASSP 2012 on Signal-Processing Challenges and Opportunities in Depth Cameras. ICASSP 2012 will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in March 2012.
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- Date: March 26, 2012
Where: European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP)
MERL Contact: Bingnan Wang
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The paper "Analysis on Wireless Power Transfer to Moving Devices Based on Array of Resonators" by Wang, B., Ellstein, D. and Teo, K.H. was presented at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP).
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- Date: March 25, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jonathan Le Roux; Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The papers "Dictionary Learning Based Pan-Sharpening" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T., "Multiple Dictionary Learning for Blocking Artifacts Reduction" by Wang, Y. and Porikli, F., "A Compressive Phase-Locked Loop" by Schnelle, S.R., Slavinsky, J.P., Boufounos, P.T., Davenport, M.A. and Baraniuk, R.G., "Indirect Model-based Speech Enhancement" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "A Clustering Approach to Optimize Online Dictionary Learning" by Rao, N. and Porikli, F., "Parametric Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection: Exploiting Persymmetric Structure" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H., "Additive Noise Removal by Sparse Reconstruction on Image Affinity Nets" by Sundaresan, R. and Porikli, F. and "Depth Sensing Using Active Coherent Illumination" by Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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