- Date: February 3, 2022
MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
Research Areas: Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
Brief - Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's computer vision group, has been invited to join the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology. This committee defines standard terms relevant to human-robot interaction in service, social, education, industrial, and research robotic applications. It establishes and defines a common terminology for practitioners and users of human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies. It is also intended to address issues common within the field of HRI, particularly surrounding the use of inconsistent and/or conflicting terms and definitions.
The invitation is a recognition of Radu's excellent record of robotics research and a significant opportunity for him to contribute to new standards in robotics terminology.
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- Date: May 31, 2022
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan from MERL's Data Analytics group has been invited to serve on the The Howard Rosenbrock Prize committee. Instituted in 2015, Optimization and Engineering journal's Howard Rosenbrock Prize is awarded annually to honor the authors of the best paper published in the journal in the previous year.
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- Date: January 24, 2022
Where: The TWIML AI Podcast
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL Speech & Audio Senior Team Leader Jonathan Le Roux was featured in an extended interview on the popular TWIML AI Podcast, presenting MERL's work towards solving the "cocktail party problem". Humans have the extraordinary ability to focus on particular sounds of interest within a complex acoustic scene, such as a cocktail party. MERL's Speech & Audio Team has been at the forefront of the field's effort to develop algorithms giving machines similar abilities. Jonathan talked with host Sam Charrington about the group's decade-long journey on this topic, from early pioneering work using deep learning for speech enhancement and speech separation, to recent works on weakly-supervised separation, hierarchical sound separation, as well as the separation of real-world soundtracks into speech, music, and sound effects (aka the "cocktail fork problem").
The TWIML AI podcast, formerly known as This Week in Machine Learning & AI, was created in 2016 and is followed by more than 10,000 subscribers on Youtube and Twitter. Jonathan's interview marks the 555th episode of the podcast.
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- Date: December 14, 2021
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL researcher Uroš Kalabić has been appointed to serve as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
The Transactions on Control Systems Technology bridge the gap between the theory and practice of control engineering. They feature publications on engineering needed to implement practical control systems.
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- Date & Time: December 9, 2021; 7pm EST
Where: virtual
MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Signal Processing group, Network Intelligence Team) is giving an invited talk titled, `Evolution of Machine Learning for Photonic Research' for the Boston Photonic Chapter of the IEEE Photonic Society on December 9. The talk covers recent MERL research on machine learning for nonlinearity compensation and nanophotonic device design.
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- Date: December 10, 2021
Research Areas: Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
Brief - MERL's Researcher Dr. Rui Ma is the keynote speaker for Electronic Design Innovation CON (EDICON2021) to be held in Shenzhen, China from Dec. 9-10, with a talk titled "Digitization and intelligence: unlocking the innovation of future radios". The conference brings together international researchers from academics, industry, and media distribution to share perspectives on the technology needed and being developed for the next generation of communication.
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- Date: November 4, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro has been elected as a Member-at-Large to serve on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He will serve a three-year term from January 2022 until December 2024.
The Board of Governors (BoG) is the governing body that oversees the activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The SPS BoG has the responsibility of establishing and implementing policy, and receiving reports from its standing boards and committees. Members-at-Large represent the member view point in the Board decision-making. They typically review, discuss, and act upon a wide range of items affecting the actions, activities, and health of the Society.
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- Date: October 21, 2021
Where: Université de Lorraine, France
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty (RS, Multiphysical Systems Team) gave an invited talk on `Bayesian-Optimized Estimation and Control for Buildings and HVAC' at the Research Center for Automatic Control (CRAN) in the University of Lorraine in France. The talk presented recent MERL research on probabilistic machine learning for set-point optimization and calibration of digital twins for building energy systems.
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- Date: September 17, 2021 - October 31, 2021
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022.
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- Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
Where: 2022 IEEE ICC
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Signal Processing Group, organizes a workshop in 2022 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The workshop is titled, "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks," and aims to bring researchers for technical discussion on fundamental and practically relevant questions to many emerging challenges in industrial private wireless networks. This workshop is also being organized with the help of other researchers from Huawei Technology, Princeton University, Aalborg University, Jinan University, and South China University of Technology. IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society's flagship conferences.
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- Date: September 7, 2021
MERL Contact: Anoop Cherian
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
Brief - Anoop Cherian, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision group, gave an invited virtual talk on "InSeGAN: An Unsupervised Approach to Identical Instance Segmentation" at the Visual Information Laboratory of University of Bristol, UK. The talk described a new approach to segmenting varied appearances of nearly identical 3D objects in depth images. More details of the talk can be found in the following paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13865, which will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'21).
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- Date: September 22, 2021
Where: The Alan Turing Institute
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - Mouhacine Benosman will give a talk about merging physical models with data-driven and machine learning methods for real-world application. The talk will include results about data-driven auto-tuning for feedback controllers with application to power amplifiers, extremum seeking and Gaussian processes for reduction/estimation of fluid dynamics models with application to indoor airflow modeling, and safe reinforcement learning for safety-critical and Sim2Real applications.
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- Date: August 12, 2021
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
Brief - Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.
Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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- Date: August 5, 2021
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Signal Processing
Brief - MERL's Distinguished Researcher Dr. Petros Boufounos is the keynote speaker for the Center for Advanced Signal and Image Sciences (CASIS) 25th Annual Workshop on Aug. 5, 2021, with talk titled, "The Computational Sensing Revolution in Array Processing."
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- Date: July 26, 2021
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - IEEE has announced that the recipients of the 2022 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Hervé Bourlard (EPFL/Idiap Research Institute) and Nelson Morgan (ICSI), "For contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition," and the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing will be Ali Sayed (EPFL), "For contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive signal processing." More details about the contributions of Prof. Bourlard and Prof. Morgan can be found in the announcements by ICSI and EPFL, and those of Prof. Sayed in EPFL's announcement. Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) has recently become the new sponsor of these two prestigious awards, and extends our warmest congratulations to all of the 2022 award recipients.
The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing, while the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing was established in 2012 for outstanding contribution to the advancement of signal processing, other than in the areas of speech and audio processing. Both awards have recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields. MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to the signal processing field through its sponsorship of these awards.
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- Date: July 13, 2021
Where: Robotics: Science and Systems
MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
Brief - MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha, and Siddarth Jain together with research groups at MIT, NVIDIA, NIST, TUM, Google DeepMind, ETH Zurich, Google AI, and UMASS Lowell organized a workshop at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2021 conference. The workshop was on "Advancing Artificial Intelligence and Manipulation for Robotics: Understanding Gaps, Industry and Academic Perspectives, and Community Building". The workshop had a list of excellent speakers both from academia and industry. Recording of the talks and of the panel discussion can be found in the link below.
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- Date: July 14, 2021
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Brief - Mouhacine Benosman co-edits a special issue on Extremum Seeking Control in the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing.
The issue contains some of the newest theoretical developments on continuous-time optimizers, known as extremum seekers, with applications ranging from microalgae cultivation control to heating and ventilation systems optimization.
The special issue is available at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10991115/current
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- Date: July 9, 2021
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) has become the new sponsor of two prestigious IEEE Technical Field Awards in Signal Processing, the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, for the years 2022-2031. "MERL is proud to support the recognition of outstanding contributions to signal processing by sponsoring both the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing. These awards celebrate the creativity and innovation in the field that touch many aspects of our lives and drive our society forward" said Dr. Anthony Vetro, VP and Director at MERL.
The IEEE Board of Directors established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing, while the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing was established in 2012 for outstanding contribution to the advancement of signal processing, other than in the areas of speech and audio processing. Both awards have since recognized the contributions of some of the most renowned pioneers and leaders in their respective fields.
By underwriting these IEEE Technical Field Awards, MERL continues to make a mark by supporting the advancement of technology that makes lasting changes in the world.
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- Date: July 12, 2021
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization
Brief - MERL researcher Rien Quirynen will present work in collaboration with Karl Berntorp on "Uncertainty Propagation by Linear Regression Kalman Filters for Stochastic Nonlinear MPC" as a keynote speaker at the 7th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control 2021 on July, 12th. The paper is 1 out of 5 keynote presentations chosen among more than 50 accepted papers at the conference. An abstract of the talk can be found in the link below.
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- Date: June 21, 2021
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Optimization
Brief - Arvind Raghunathan has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA).
JOTA is devoted to the publication of carefully selected high quality regular papers, invited papers, survey papers, technical notes, book notices, and forums that cover mathematical optimization techniques, computational methodologies of optimization algorithms and their applications to science, engineering, and business. Typical theoretical areas include linear, nonlinear, discrete, stochastic, and dynamic optimization. Among the areas of application covered are mathematical economics, mathematical physics and biology, all areas of engineering, and novel areas, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing optimization.
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- Date: June 18, 2021
Research Areas: Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
Brief - During the 2021 International Microwave Symposium Week (June 20-25), Rui Ma will give an invited talk on MERL's recent power amplifiers research at an IMS Technical Workshop to be held on June 21st, titled "From Digital to Intelligent: Advancement of MISO Power Amplifiers by Machine Learning".
IMS is the annual flagship conference of IEEE MTT-S (Microwave Theory and Techniques Society) and the centerpiece of Microwave Week. It is the largest gathering of RF/Microwave professionals in the world and combines multiple technical conferences with the biggest commercial exhibitions for the microwave industry.
Mitsubishi Electric U.S. (MEUS) will also host an online interactive booth to showcase our latest high-frequency Semiconductor & Device products at IMS week.
More detailed information can be found at the Mitsubishi Electric booth.
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- Date: April 23, 2021
MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik
Research Areas: Communications, Electric Systems
Brief - IoT applications such as smart metering system are rapidly increasing. A broad range of low power wide area communication technologies have been developed. These systems all operate in frequencies below 1 GHz, commonly called Sub-1 GHz frequency bands, to meet various application requirements. Several communication standards and proprietary technologies already use the Sub-1 GHz bands: IEEE 802.15.4g (Wi-SUN), IEEE 802.11ah (Wi-Fi HaLow), LoRa, SigFox and RFID. Due to limited spectrum in the Sub-1 GHz frequency bands, it is likely that applications will compete for the same resources and interfere with one another. This is a particular issue in Japan where the amount of license-exempt Sub-1 GHz frequencies is more limited than in other regulatory regions. Therefore, the coexistence becomes an issue to be addressed. Accordingly, IEEE New Standards Committee and Standard Board formed IEEE 802.19.3 Task Group in 2018 to develop guidelines and best practices for the coexistence of IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 based systems and to guide product deployment. MERL member Jianlin Guo took a lead role as Task Group Technical Editor, and was supported by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation researchers Yukimasa Nagai, Takenori Sumi and consultant Benjamin A. Rolfe (Task Group Chair) in the development of this standard. As of April 2021 a new standard recommended practice document, IEEE Recommended Practice for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks—Part 19: Coexistence Methods for IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 Based Systems Operating in the Sub‐1 GHz Frequency Bands, was published. This will help guide future IoT/smart metering system deployment. The standard is widely available for download from the IEEE Standards Association at https://standards.ieee.org/standard/802_19_3-2021.html.
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- Date: April 22, 2021
Where: Houston, Texas
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics, Signal Processing
Brief - The invited seminar "System Design, Planning, and Control for Autonomous Driving" was part of the Distinguished Seminar series at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, Houston, Tx. The invited lecture described MERL research related to the different system components involved in autonomous driving, with particular focus on motion-planning and predictive-control methods.
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- Date: April 15, 2021
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning
Brief - The cover article in the April issue of Microwave Journal features MERL and MELCO's invited paper entitled "A New Frontier for Power Amplifiers Enabled by Machine Learning". Our recent research applying ML for optimizing operating conditions of advanced power amplifier designs is highlighted.
Since 1958, Microwave Journal has been the leading source for information about RF and Microwave technology, design techniques, news, events and educational information. Microwave Journal reaches 50,000 qualified readers monthly with a print magazine that has a global reach.
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- Date: April 9, 2021
MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
Brief - Ankush Chakrabarty, a Research Scientist at MERL's Multiphysical Systems (MS) Team, gave an invited talk on "Learning for Control and Estimation using Digital Twins" at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Seminar Series organized at UIC. The talk proposed new learning-based control/estimation architectures that can utilize simulation data obtained from digital twins to add self-optimization and constraint-enforcement features to grey/black-box control systems.
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