News & Events

1,554 News items, Awards, Events and Talks related to MERL and its staff.


  •  NEWS    OCS 2012: publication by Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Chunjie Duan, Keisuke Kojima, Kieran J. Parsons and others
    Date: January 26, 2012
    Where: IEICE Optical Communication Systems (OCS)
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
    Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • The paper "Fractionally-Spaced Equalizer Based on High-Order Statistics in Nonlinear Fiber Optics" by Koike-Akino, T., Duan, C., Parsons, K., Kojima, K., Yoshida, T., Sugihara, T. and Mizuochi, T. was presented at IEICE Optical Communication Systems (OCS).
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: January 10, 2012
    Where: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • The article "Scalable Active Learning for Multi-Class Image Classification" by Joshi, A.J., Porikli, F. and Papanikolopoulos, N. was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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  •  TALK    Secure Computation and Interference in Networks: Performance Limits and Efficient Protocols
    Date & Time: Wednesday, January 4, 2012; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Ye Wang, AgaMatrix, Inc.
    Abstract
    • In the field of Secure Multi-party Computation, the general objective is to design protocols that allow a group of parties to securely compute functions of their collective private data, while maintaining privacy (in that no parties reveal any more information about their personal data than necessary) and ensuring correctness (in that no parties can disrupt or influence the computation beyond the affect of changing their input data). Information theoretic approaches toward this broad problem, that provide provable (unconditional) security guarantees (even against adversaries that have unbounded computational power), have established that general computation is possible in a variety of scenarios. However, these general solutions are not always the most efficient or finely tuned to the requirements of specific problems and applications.

      In this talk, we will overview our work toward the development of efficient information theoretic approaches for secure multi-party computation applications within the common theme of secure computation and inference over a distributed data network. These applications include:

      1) private information retrieval, where the objective is to privately obtain data without revealing what was selected;
      2) secure statistical analysis, the problem of extracting statistics without revealing anything else about the underlying distributed data;
      3) secure sampling, which is the secure distributed generation of new data with a given joint distribution; and
      4) secure authentication, where the identity of a party needs to authenticated via inference on his credentials and stored registration data.

      Our contributions toward these applications include the following. We proposed a novel oblivious transfer protocol, applicable to private information retrieval, that trades off a small amount privacy for a drastic increase in efficiency. We leveraged a dimensionality reduction that exploits functional structure to simultaneously achieve arbitrarily high accuracy and efficiency in protocols that perform secure statistical analysis of distributed databases. Toward characterizing the region of distributions that can be securely sampled from scratch, we fully characterized the two-party scenario and provided inner and outer bounds on the multi-party scenario. Toward enabling secure distributed authentication, we proposed a two-factor secure biometric authentication system that is robust against the compromise of registered biometric data, allowing for revocability and providing resistance against cross-enrollment attacks.
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  •  NEWS    Video Analytics for Business Intelligence: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: January 1, 2012
    Where: Video Analytics for Business Intelligence
    Research Area: Machine Learning
    Brief
    • The article "Object Detection & Tracking" by Porikli, F. and Yilmaz, A. was published in the book Video Analytics for Business Intelligence.
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  •  TALK    Electrical Power Storage Technology
    Date & Time: Tuesday, December 20, 2011; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Olivia Leitermann, MIT
    MERL Host: Daniel N. Nikovski
    Research Area: Data Analytics
    Abstract
    • Ancillary services such as frequency regulation are required for reliable operation of the electric grid. Currently, the same traditional thermal generators that supply bulk power also perform nearly all frequency regulation. Instead, using high power energy storage resources to provide frequency regulation can allow traditional thermal generators to operate more smoothly. However, using energy storage alone for frequency regulation would require an unreasonably large energy storage capacity. Duration curves for energy capacity and instantaneous ramp rate are used to evaluate the requirements and benefits of using energy storage for a component of frequency regulation. High-pass filtering and closed-loop control are used to separate the portion of a frequency regulation control signal suitable for provision by an energy storage unit from the portion suitable for provision by traditional thermal generating resources. Not all frequency regulation signals are equally amenable to the filtering approach used here. Data from two U.S. control areas are used to demonstrate the techniques and the results are compared.
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  •  NEWS    CDC-ECC 2011: publication by Alan W. Esenther and Daniel N. Nikovski
    Date: December 12, 2011
    Where: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC)
    MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
    Research Area: Optimization
    Brief
    • The paper "Construction of Embedded Markov Decision Processes for Optimal Control of Non-Linear Systems with Continuous State Spaces" by Nikovski, D. and Esenther, A. was presented at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC).
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  •  NEWS    ISDRS 2011: publication by Chunjie Duan, Koon Hoo Teo, Jinyun Zhang and others
    Date: December 7, 2011
    Where: International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS)
    MERL Contact: Jinyun Zhang
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
    Brief
    • The paper "Design and Simulation of Enhancement-mode N-polar GaN Single-channel and Dual-channel MIS-HEMTs" by Feng, P., Teo, K.H., Oishi, T., Nakayama, M., Duan, C. and Zhang, J. was presented at the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS).
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  •  NEWS    GLOBECOM 2011: publication by Toshiaki Koike-Akino and Chunjie Duan
    Date: December 5, 2011
    Where: IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM)
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Area: Communications
    Brief
    • The paper "Secrecy Rate Analysis of Jamming Superposition in Presence of Many Eavesdropping Users" by Koike-Akino, T. and Duan, C. was presented at the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM).
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  •  TALK    Interesting and unusual forms of autostereo display
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 1, 2011; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Gregg Favalora, Optics for Hire (OFH)
    MERL Host: Matthew Brand
    Abstract
    • I'll give an information-rich survey presentation on "interesting and unusual" forms of autostereo display. It will assume basic knowledge of autostereo, e.g. lenticular and parallax barrier displays [unless, of course, you'd like a few minutes going over the basics.] I will discuss: spatially-multiplexed, time-multiplexed, and multi-projector systems. This includes: non-obvious depth cues, advances in parallax barrier displays, lenticulars, multi-projector / projection onto corrugated screens, scanned illumination, volumetric, and electro-holographic techniques.
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  •  NEWS    International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI) 2011: publication by Bret A. Harsham and others
    Date: November 30, 2011
    Where: International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI)
    Brief
    • The paper "Evaluating the Usability of a Head-Up Display for Selection from Choice Lists in Cars" by Weinberg, G., Harsham, B. and Medenica, Z. was presented at the International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI).
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  •  NEWS    WIFS 2011: publication by Petros T. Boufounos and Shantanu D. Rane
    Date: November 29, 2011
    Where: IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Information Security
    Brief
    • The paper "Secure Binary Embeddings for Privacy Preserving Nearest Neighbors" by Boufounos, P. and Rane, S. was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Transactions on Communications: publication by Jinyun Zhang and others
    Date: November 23, 2011
    Where: IEEE Transactions on Communications
    MERL Contact: Jinyun Zhang
    Research Area: Communications
    Brief
    • The article "Unified Spectral Efficiency Analysis of Cellular Systems with Channel-Aware Schedulers" by Wu, J., Mehta, N.B., Molisch, A.F. and Zhang, J. was published in IEEE Transactions on Communications.
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  •  TALK    Scheduling and Medium Access in Wireless Networks
    Date & Time: Friday, November 18, 2011; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Shreeshankar Bodas, MIT
    Abstract
    • We look at the problem of designing "efficient" resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks. The volume of data transferred over the wireless network has been ever-growing, but the resources (time, frequency) are not growing at the same rate. We therefore need to design good resource allocation schemes to guarantee a good quality of service to the users.

      In the first part of the talk, we look at the wireless access network, such as Wi-Fi. We have three objectives: ensure high resource utilization, low user-perceived latency, while keeping the computational burden on the devices to a minimum. An interesting recent result by Shah et al says that these three objectives are incompatible with other, unless P=NP. We design a physical layer-aware medium access algorithm that simultaneously achieves the three objectives, and thereby show that the hardness result by Shah et al is an artifact of a simplistic view of the physical layer.

      The second part of the talk focuses on designing scheduling algorithms for wireless downlink networks, such as a cellular network. Our objectives (again) are high resource utilization, low per-user delay, and a "simple" algorithm. We outline the drawbacks of the classic MaxWeight-type algorithms, and design iterative resource allocation schemes that perform well on all the three fronts.
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  •  NEWS    ACSSC 2011: publication by Petros T. Boufounos and others
    Date: November 6, 2011
    Where: Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (ACSSC)
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Computational Sensing
    Brief
    • The paper "Greedy Sparsity-Constrained Optimization" by Bahmani, S., Boufounos, P. and Raj, B. was presented at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (ACSSC).
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  •  NEWS    ICCV 2011: publication by Michael J. Jones, Tim K. Marks and others
    Date: November 6, 2011
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
    MERL Contacts: Tim K. Marks; Michael J. Jones
    Brief
    • The paper "Fully Automatic Pose-Invariant Face Recognition via 3D Pose Normalization" by Asthana, A., Marks, T.K., Jones, M.J., Tieu, K.H. and Rohith, M. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).
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  •  NEWS    Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis: publication by Petros T. Boufounos and others
    Date: November 1, 2011
    Where: Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis
    MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
    Research Area: Computational Sensing
    Brief
    • The article "Democracy in Action: Quantization, Saturation and Compressive Sensing" by Laska, J.N., Boufounos, P.T., Davenport, M.A. and Baraniuk, R.G. was published in Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis.
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Signal Processing Magazine: publication by MERL researchers and others
    Date: October 31, 2011
    Where: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
    Research Area: Computer Vision
    Brief
    • The article "Multimedia Quality Assessment" by Porikli, F., Bovik, A., Plack, C., AlRegib, G., Farrell, J., LeCallet, P., Huynth-Thu, Q., Moeller, S. and Winkler, S. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
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  •  NEWS    InfoVis 2011: publication by Kent B. Wittenburg and others
    Date: October 23, 2011
    Where: InfoVis
    Research Area: Data Analytics
    Brief
    • The paper "Singleton Set Distribution Views for Set-Valued Attribute Visualization" by Wittenburg, K. and Pekhteryev, G. was presented at InfoVis.
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  •  TALK    Auxiliary Function Approach to Source Localization and Separation
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 3:40 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Nobutaka Ono, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Analysing Digital Music
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 2:20 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Mark Plumbley, Queen Mary, London
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  EVENT    Audio and Music Signal Processing Mini-Symposium
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 2:00 PM -5:00 PM
    Location: MERL
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL is hosting a mini-symposium on audio and music signal processing, with three talks by eminent researchers in the field: Prof. Mark Plumbley, Dr. Cedric Fevotte and Prof. Nobutaka Ono.
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  •  TALK    Itakura-Saito nonnegative matrix factorization and friends for music signal decomposition
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 3:00 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Cedric Fevotte, CNRS - Telecom ParisTech, Paris
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  NEWS    International Low Carbon Earth Summit 2011: publication by Koon Hoo Teo
    Date: October 19, 2011
    Where: International Low Carbon Earth Summit
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
    Brief
    • The paper "Charging Technology Enabler for Electric Vehicle" by Teo, K.H. was presented at the International Low Carbon Earth Summit.
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  •  EVENT    MMSP 2011 - IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop
    Date: Monday, October 17, 2011 - Wednesday, October 19, 2011
    Location: Hangzhou, China
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro is the General Co-chair of MMSP 2011, the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, to be held in Hangzhou, China, in October 2011.
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  •  EVENT    MMSP 2011 - IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop
    Date: Monday, October 17, 2011 - Wednesday, October 19, 2011
    Location: Hangzhou, China
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • MERL is a sponsor for the 2011 edition of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop.
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