MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Kieran Parsons

Kieran Parsons
Kieran's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Kieran spent 12 years in Canada working at Nortel, BelAir Networks and AMCC on the system design of several wireless and optical technologies, including early work on electronic dispersion compensation for optical links. His research interests include optical communications network architecture and digital signal processing algorithms for coherent optical communications.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    Jianlin Guo recently delivered an invited talk at 2022 6th International Conference on Intelligent Manufacturing and Automation Engineering
      Date: December 15, 2022 - December 17, 2022
      MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning
      Brief
      • The performance of manufacturing systems is heavily affected by downtime – the time period that the system halts production due to system failure, anomalous operation, or intrusion. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and diagnose anomalies to allow predictive maintenance or intrusion detection to reduce downtime. This talk, titled "Anomaly detection and diagnosis in manufacturing systems using autoencoder", focuses on tackling the challenges arising from predictive maintenance in manufacturing systems. It presents a structured autoencoder and a pre-processed autoencoder for accurate anomaly detection, as well as a statistical-based algorithm and an autoencoder-based algorithm for anomaly diagnosis.
    •  
    •  NEWS    MERL researchers presenting workshop papers at NeurIPS 2022
      Date: December 2, 2022 - December 8, 2022
      MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Saviz Mowlavi; Kieran Parsons; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • In addition to 5 papers in recent news (https://www.merl.com/news/news-20221129-1450), MERL researchers presented 2 papers at the NeurIPS Conference Workshop, which was held Dec. 2-8. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning.

        - “Optimal control of PDEs using physics-informed neural networks” by Saviz Mowlavi and Saleh Nabi

        Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently become a popular method for solving forward and inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). By incorporating the residual of the PDE into the loss function of a neural network-based surrogate model for the unknown state, PINNs can seamlessly blend measurement data with physical constraints. Here, we extend this framework to PDE-constrained optimal control problems, for which the governing PDE is fully known and the goal is to find a control variable that minimizes a desired cost objective. We validate the performance of the PINN framework by comparing it to state-of-the-art adjoint-based optimization, which performs gradient descent on the discretized control variable while satisfying the discretized PDE.

        - “Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory” by Vasu Singla, Shuchin Aeron, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Matthew E. Brand, Kieran Parsons, Ye Wang

        Noisy annotations in real-world datasets pose a challenge for training deep neural networks (DNNs), detrimentally impacting generalization performance as incorrect labels may be memorized. In this work, we probe the observations that early stopping and low-dimensional subspace learning can help address this issue. First, we show that a prior method is sensitive to the early stopping hyper-parameter. Second, we investigate the effectiveness of PCA, for approximating the optimization trajectory under noisy label information. We propose to estimate the low-rank subspace through robust and structured variants of PCA, namely Robust PCA, and Sparse PCA. We find that the subspace estimated through these variants can be less sensitive to early stopping, and can outperform PCA to achieve better test error when trained on noisy labels.

        - In addition, new MERL researcher, Jing Liu, also presented a paper entitled “CoPur: Certifiably Robust Collaborative Inference via Feature Purification" based on his previous work before joining MERL. His paper was elected as a spotlight paper to be highlighted in lightening talks and featured paper panel.
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  • Awards

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  • Research Highlights

  • MERL Publications

    •  Singla, V., Aeron, S., Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., Brand, M., Wang, Y., "Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory", NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Distribution Shifts (DistShift), December 2022.
      BibTeX TR2022-156 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Singla2022dec,
      • author = {Singla, Vasu and Aeron, Shuchin and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Parsons, Kieran and Brand, Matthew and Wang, Ye},
      • title = {Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory},
      • booktitle = {NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Distribution Shifts (DistShift)},
      • year = 2022,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-156}
      • }
    •  Skvortcov, P., Koike-Akino, T., Millar, D.S., Kojima, K., Parsons, K., "Dual Coding Concatenation for Burst-Error Correction in Probabilistic Amplitude Shaping", IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, DOI: 10.1109/​JLT.2022.3178675, Vol. 40, No. 16, pp. 5502-5513, November 2022.
      BibTeX TR2022-145 PDF
      • @article{Skvortcov2022nov,
      • author = {Skvortcov, Pavel and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Millar, David S. and Kojima, Keisuke and Parsons, Kieran},
      • title = {Dual Coding Concatenation for Burst-Error Correction in Probabilistic Amplitude Shaping},
      • journal = {IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology},
      • year = 2022,
      • volume = 40,
      • number = 16,
      • pages = {5502--5513},
      • month = nov,
      • doi = {10.1109/JLT.2022.3178675},
      • issn = {1558-2213},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-145}
      • }
    •  Yu, X., Smedemark-Margulies, N., Aeron, S., Koike-Akino, T., Moulin, P., Brand, M., Parsons, K., Wang, Y., "Improving Adversarial Robustness by Learning Shared Information", Pattern Recognition, DOI: 10.1016/​j.patcog.2022.109054, Vol. 134, pp. 109054, November 2022.
      BibTeX TR2022-141 PDF
      • @article{Yu2022nov,
      • author = {Yu, Xi and Smedemark-Margulies, Niklas and Aeron, Shuchin and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Moulin, Pierre and Brand, Matthew and Parsons, Kieran and Wang, Ye},
      • title = {Improving Adversarial Robustness by Learning Shared Information},
      • journal = {Pattern Recognition},
      • year = 2022,
      • volume = 134,
      • pages = 109054,
      • month = nov,
      • doi = {10.1016/j.patcog.2022.109054},
      • issn = {0031-3203},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-141}
      • }
    •  Wang, S., Guo, J., Wang, P., Parsons, K., Orlik, P.V., Nagai, Y., Sumi, T., Pathak, P., ,, "X-Disco: Cross-technology Neighbor Discovery", IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, September 2022.
      BibTeX TR2022-119 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Wang2022sep2,
      • author = {Wang, Shuai and Guo, Jianlin and Wang, Pu and Parsons, Kieran and Orlik, Philip V. and Nagai, Yukimasa and Sumi, Takenori and Pathak, Parth and},
      • title = {X-Disco: Cross-technology Neighbor Discovery},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking},
      • year = 2022,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-119}
      • }
    •  Rapp, J., Mansour, H., Boufounos, P.T., Orlik, P.V., Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., "Maximum Likelihood Surface Profilometry via Optical Coherence Tomography", IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), DOI: 10.1109/​ICIP46576.2022.9897247, September 2022, pp. 1561-1565.
      BibTeX TR2022-117 PDF Video
      • @inproceedings{Rapp2022sep,
      • author = {Rapp, Joshua and Mansour, Hassan and Boufounos, Petros T. and Orlik, Philip V. and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Parsons, Kieran},
      • title = {Maximum Likelihood Surface Profilometry via Optical Coherence Tomography},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)},
      • year = 2022,
      • pages = {1561--1565},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.1109/ICIP46576.2022.9897247},
      • issn = {2381-8549},
      • isbn = {978-1-6654-9620-9},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-117}
      • }
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  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Frequency Modulated Image Reconstruction"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Wang, Pu; Parsons, Kieran; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 11,346,932
      Issue Date: May 31, 2022
    • Title: "An Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) System for Producing Profilometry Measurements of a Specimen"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Yurdakul, Celalettin; Wang, Pu; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 11,262,184
      Issue Date: Mar 1, 2022
    • Title: "Reference-Free Nonlinearity Correction for FMCW-Based Sensing Systems"
      Inventors: Wang, Pu; Millar, David; Lin, Chungwei; Parsons, Kieran; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 10,969,465
      Issue Date: Apr 6, 2021
    • Title: "Loose Optical Fiber Tethering Of Multiple Satellites"
      Inventors: Parsons, Kieran; Weiss, Avishai; Orlik, Philip V.; Di Cairano, Stefano
      Patent No.: 10,892,826
      Issue Date: Jan 12, 2021
    • Title: "Optical Ring circuit with electrical filter"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Teng, Min; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Lin, Chungwei; Parsons, Kieran; Gotoda, Mitsunobu; Akiyama, Koichi
      Patent No.: 10,838,282
      Issue Date: Nov 17, 2020
    • Title: "System and Method for Short Block Length Distribution Matching"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran; Kojima, Keisuke
      Patent No.: 10,749,554
      Issue Date: Aug 18, 2020
    • Title: "Pilot-Aided Carrier Phase Estimation for Optical Communications"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Pajovic, Milutin; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 10,554,309
      Issue Date: Feb 4, 2020
    • Title: "Short Block Length Distribution Matching Algorithm"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Fehenberger, Tobias; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 10,541,711
      Issue Date: Jan 21, 2020
    • Title: "Distribution Matcher"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Fehenberger, Tobias; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran; Kojima, Keisuke
      Patent No.: 10,516,503
      Issue Date: Dec 24, 2019
    • Title: "Optical Signal Transmitter and Optical Signal Encoder Using Constant Modulus Formats, and Method for Generating Modulation Codes"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Yoshida, Tsuyoshi; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Millar, David; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 10,320,486
      Issue Date: Jun 11, 2019
    • Title: "Partition Based Distribution Matcher for Probabilistic Constellation Shaping"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Fehenberger, Tobias; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 10,069,519
      Issue Date: Sep 4, 2018
    • Title: "Frequency Domain Equalizer for Optical Communications"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Paskov, Milen; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran; Kojima, Keisuke
      Patent No.: 9,917,712
      Issue Date: Mar 13, 2018
    • Title: "Methods for Compensation of Cross-Polarization Modulation (XPolM) Impairments in Coherent Optical Communications"
      Inventors: Pajovic, Milutin; Parsons, Kieran; Millar, David; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke
      Patent No.: 9,906,308
      Issue Date: Feb 27, 2018
    • Title: "Resource Aware Routing in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,900,824
      Issue Date: Feb 20, 2018
    • Title: "Synchronized Multi-Sink Routing for Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,826,493
      Issue Date: Nov 21, 2017
    • Title: "Optical Signal Transmitter and Optical Communication System Using Constant Modulus Formats, and Method for Generating Modulation Codes"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Yoshida, Tsuyoshi; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Millar, David; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,806,739
      Issue Date: Oct 31, 2017
    • Title: "Fast Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) Computation for Decoding High-Order and High-Dimensional Modulation Schemes"
      Inventors: Millar, David; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,749,089
      Issue Date: Aug 29, 2017
    • Title: "Energy Efficient Management of Heterogeneous Multi-Hop Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Liu, Kaikai; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,736,771
      Issue Date: Aug 15, 2017
    • Title: "Method for Generating Constant Modulus Multi-Dimensional Modulations for Coherent Optical Communications"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Millar, David; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,621,275
      Issue Date: Apr 11, 2017
    • Title: "Adaptive Error Correction Code for Optical Super-Channels"
      Inventors: Kojima, Keisuke; Parsons, Kieran; Millar, David; Koike-Akino, Toshiaki
      Patent No.: 9,584,256
      Issue Date: Feb 28, 2017
    • Title: "Tracking of Occluded Navigation Satellite Signals"
      Inventors: Kim, Kyeong-Jin; Osechas, Okuary; Kniazev, Andrei; Parsons, Kieran; Sahinoglu, Zafer
      Patent No.: 9,476,990
      Issue Date: Oct 25, 2016
    • Title: "Inter-Channel Interference Management for Optical Super-Channels"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Kojima, Keisuke; Millar, David; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,432,124
      Issue Date: Aug 30, 2016
    • Title: "Discovering Stable Routes in Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Yang, Xin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,407,559
      Issue Date: Aug 2, 2016
    • Title: "Optical Channel Data Unit Switch with Distributed Control"
      Inventors: Duan, Chunjie; Bhatti, Ghulam M.; Parsons, Kieran; Koguchi, Kazuumi; Kametani, Soichiro
      Patent No.: 9,246,748
      Issue Date: Jan 26, 2016
    • Title: "Passive Synchronization in Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,226,253
      Issue Date: Dec 29, 2015
    • Title: "Method for Clustering Devices in Machine-to-Machine Networks to Minimize Collisions"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,225,606
      Issue Date: Dec 29, 2015
    • Title: "Method for Separating Multi-Component Signals"
      Inventors: Sahinoglu, Zafer; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,190,955
      Issue Date: Nov 17, 2015
    • Title: "Method for Discovering Neighboring Nodes in Wireless Networks"
      Inventors: Guo, Jianlin; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 9,148,845
      Issue Date: Sep 29, 2015
    • Title: "Adaptively Coding and Modulating Signals Transmitted Via Nonlinear Channels"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran; Duan, Chunjie; Kojima, Keisuke
      Patent No.: 9,077,508
      Issue Date: Jul 7, 2015
    • Title: "Methods for Energy Efficient Reoptimization of Optical Networks"
      Inventors: Parsons, Kieran; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 8,891,967
      Issue Date: Nov 18, 2014
    • Title: "Methods for Determining Energy Efficient Optical Routes"
      Inventors: Yim, Man Hei Raymond; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 8,634,714
      Issue Date: Jan 21, 2014
    • Title: "Iterative Carrier Phase Compensation in Coherent Fiber Optic Receivers"
      Inventors: Duan, Chunjie; Parsons, Kieran; Orlik, Philip V.
      Patent No.: 8,498,544
      Issue Date: Jul 30, 2013
    • Title: "Adaptive Cross-Polarization Modulation Cancellers for Coherent Optical Communication System"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Parsons, Kieran; Liu, Cheng
      Patent No.: 8,472,809
      Issue Date: Jun 25, 2013
    • Title: "Cross-Free High-Dimensional Constellations for Dual-Polarized Non-Linear Fiber-Optic Communications"
      Inventors: Koike-Akino, Toshiaki; Orlik, Philip V.; Parsons, Kieran
      Patent No.: 8,433,205
      Issue Date: Apr 30, 2013
    • Title: "Method for Performing Soft Decision Decoding of Euclidean Space Reed-Muller Codes"
      Inventors: Orlik, Philip V.; Yim, Man Hei Raymond; Parsons, Kieran; Tarokh, Vahid; Zhang, Jinyun
      Patent No.: 8,245,116
      Issue Date: Aug 14, 2012
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