- Date: January 29, 2012
Where: AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - The paper "Optimized Three-Body Gravity Assists and Manifold Transfers in End-to-End Lunar Mission Design" by Grover, P. and Andersson, C. was presented at the AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting.
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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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