News & Events

167 News items and Awards found.


  •  NEWS    Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release Announces Worlds First GaN Power Amplifier Capable of Wideband Operation for 4G, 5G and Beyond 5G/6G.
    Date: June 8, 2023
    MERL Contact: Toshiaki Koike-Akino
    Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced today it has developed what is believed to be the world's first gallium nitride (GaN) power amplifier that achieves a frequency range of 3,400MHz using a single power amplifier, which the company has demonstrated can be used for 4G, 5G and Beyond 5G/6G communication systems operating at different frequencies in a single base station. The amplifier is expected to enable the radio unit (transceiver) to be shared with different communication systems and lead to more power-efficient base stations.

      Mitsubishi Electric Researchers, Toshiaki Koike-Akino and Koon Hoo Teo helped developed the technology and device. Technical details will be presented at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium 2023 this month.

      Please see the link below for the full press release from Mitsubishi Electric.
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  •  NEWS    Ankush Chakrabarty co-organized three sessions at the ACC2023, and was nominated for Best Energy Systems Paper.
    Date: June 30, 2023 - June 2, 2023
    Where: San Diego, CA
    MERL Contact: Ankush Chakrabarty
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Ankush Chakrabarty (researcher, Multiphysical Systems Team) co-organized and spoke at 3 sessions at the 2023 American Control Conference in San Diego, CA. These include: (1) A tutorial session (w/ Stefano Di Cairano) on "Physics Informed Machine Learning for Modeling and Control": an effort with contributions from multiple academic institutes and US research labs; (2) An invited session on "Energy Efficiency in Smart Buildings and Cities" in which his paper (w/ Chris Laughman) on "Local Search Region Constrained Bayesian Optimization for Performance Optimization of Vapor Compression Systems" was nominated for Best Energy Systems Paper Award; and, (3) A special session on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to improve recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups in STEM research.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers present 10 papers at the American Control Conference (ACC)
    Date: May 31, 2023 - June 2, 2023
    Where: San Diego, CA
    MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Ankush Chakrabarty; Vedang M. Deshpande; Stefano Di Cairano; Devesh K. Jha; Christopher R. Laughman; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang; Avishai Weiss
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
    Brief
    • MERL will present 10 papers at the American Control Conference (ACC) in San Diego, CA, with topics including autonomous-vehicle decision making and control, physics-informed machine learning, motion planning, control subject to nonconvex chance constraints, and optimal power management. Two talks are part of tutorial sessions.
      MERL will also be present at the conference as a sponsor, with a booth for discussing with researchers and students, and hosting a special session at lunch with highlights of MERL research and work philosophy.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Researchers Present Thirteen Papers at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    Date: May 29, 2023 - June 2, 2023
    Where: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Tim K. Marks; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres
    Research Areas: Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers will present thirteen papers, including eight main conference papers and five workshop papers, at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) to be held in London, UK from May 29 to June 2. ICRA is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the robotics community. The papers cover a broad set of topics in Robotics including estimation, manipulation, vision-based object recognition and segmentation, tactile estimation and tool manipulation, robotic food handling, robot skill learning, and model-based reinforcement learning.

      In addition to the paper presentations, MERL robotics researchers will also host an exhibition booth and look forward to discussing our research with visitors.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented four papers and organized a special session at The 14th IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference
    Date: May 15, 2023 - May 18, 2023
    Where: San Francisco, CA
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Bingnan Wang
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Control, Electric Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Yusuke Sakamoto, Anantaram Varatharajan, and
      Bingnan Wang presented four papers at IEMDC 2023 held May 15-18 in San Francisco, CA. The topics of the four oral presentations range from electric machine design optimization, to fault detection and sensorless control. Bingnan Wang organized a special session at the conference entitled: Learning-based Electric Machine Design and Optimization. Bingnan Wang and Yusuke Sakamoto together chaired the special session, as well as a session on: Condition Monitoring, Fault Diagnosis and Prognosis.

      The 14th IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference: IEMDC 2023, is one of the major conferences in the area of electric machines and drives. The conference was established in 1997 and has taken place every two years thereafter.
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  •  NEWS    Jonathan Le Roux gives invited talk at CMU's Language Technology Institute Colloquium
    Date: December 9, 2022
    Where: Pittsburg, PA
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist and Speech and Audio Senior Team Leader, Jonathan Le Roux, was invited by Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technology Institute (LTI) to give an invited talk as part of the LTI Colloquium Series. The LTI Colloquium is a prestigious series of talks given by experts from across the country related to different areas of language technologies. Jonathan's talk, entitled "Towards general and flexible audio source separation", presented an overview of techniques developed at MERL towards the goal of robustly and flexibly decomposing and analyzing an acoustic scene, describing in particular the Speech and Audio Team's efforts to extend MERL's early speech separation and enhancement methods to more challenging environments, and to more general and less supervised scenarios.
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  •  NEWS    Rien Quirynen Appointed IPC Vice-Chair for the 8th IFAC Conference on NMPC 2024
    Date: August 27, 2024 - August 30, 2024
    Where: Kyoto, Japan
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Rien Quirynen has been appointed as Vice-Chair from Industry of the International Program Committee of the 8th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, which will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in August 2024.

      IFAC NMPC is the main symposium focused on model predictive control, theory, methods and applications, includes contributions on control, optimization, and machine learning research, and is held every 3 years.
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  •  NEWS    Chris Laughman delivered two seminar talks for at the School of Engineering at Penn State
    Date: February 16, 2023 - February 17, 2023
    Where: Pennsylvania State University
    MERL Contact: Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling
    Brief
    • On February 16 and 17, Chris Laughman, Senior Team Leader of the Multiphysical Systems Team, presented lectures for the Systems, Robotics, and Controls Seminar Series in the School of Engineering, and for the Distinguished Speaker Series in Architectural Engineering. His talk was titled "Architectural Thermofluid Systems: Next-Generation Challenges and Opportunities," and described characteristics of these systems that require specific attention in model-based system engineering processes, as well as MERL research to address these challenges.
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  •  AWARD    MERL paper wins major award from IEEE Computer Society
    Date: January 12, 2023
    Awarded to: William T. Freeman, Thouis R. Jones, and Egon C. Pasztor
    Awarded by: IEEE Computer Society
    Research Areas: Computer Vision, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • The MERL paper entitled, "Example-Based Super-Resolution" by William T. Freeman, Thouis R. Jones, and Egon C. Pasztor, published in a 2002 issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, has been awarded a 2021 Test of Time Award by the IEEE Computer Society. This work was done while the principal investigator, Prof. Freeman, was a research scientist at MERL; he is now a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

      This best paper award recognizes regular or special issue papers published by the magazine that have made profound and long-lasting research impacts in bridging the theory and practice of computer graphics. "This paper is an early example of using learning for a low-level vision task and we are very proud of the pioneering work that MERL has done in this area prior to the deep learning revolution," says Anthony Vetro, VP & Director at MERL.
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  •  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.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Researchers gave a Tutorial Talk on Quantum Machine Learning for Sensing and Communications at IEEE GLOBECOM
    Date: December 8, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Pu (Perry) Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • On December 8, 2022, MERL researchers Toshiaki Koike-Akino and Pu (Perry) Wang gave a 3.5-hour tutorial presentation at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM). The talk, titled "Post-Deep Learning Era: Emerging Quantum Machine Learning for Sensing and Communications," addressed recent trends, challenges, and advances in sensing and communications. P. Wang presented on use cases, industry trends, signal processing, and deep learning for Wi-Fi integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), while T. Koike-Akino discussed the future of deep learning, giving a comprehensive overview of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, natural computing, emerging quantum AI, and their diverse applications. The tutorial was conducted remotely. MERL's quantum AI technology was partly reported in the recent press release (https://us.mitsubishielectric.com/en/news/releases/global/2022/1202-a/index.html).

      The IEEE GLOBECOM is a highly anticipated event for researchers and industry professionals in the field of communications. Organized by the IEEE Communications Society, the flagship conference is known for its focus on driving innovation in all aspects of the field. Each year, over 3,000 scientific researchers submit proposals for program sessions at the annual conference. The theme of this year's conference was "Accelerating the Digital Transformation through Smart Communications," and featured a comprehensive technical program with 13 symposia, various tutorials and workshops.
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  •  NEWS    MERL's Quantum Machine Learning Technology Featured in Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release
    Date: December 2, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Human-Computer Interaction
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced its development of a quantum artificial intelligence (AI) technology that automatically optimizes inference models to downsize the scale of computation with quantum neural networks. The new quantum AI technology can be integrated with classical machine learning frameworks for diverse solutions.

      Mitsubishi Electric has confirmed that the technology can be incorporated in the world's first applications for terahertz (THz) imaging, Wi-Fi indoor monitoring, compressed sensing, and brain-computer interfaces. The technology is based on recent research by MERL's Connectivity & Information Processing team and Computational Sensing team.

      Mitsubishi Electric's new quantum machine learning (QML) technology realizes compact inference models by fully exploiting the enormous capacity of quantum computers to express exponentially larger-state space with the number of quantum bits (qubits). In a hybrid combination of both quantum and classical AI, the technology can compensate for limitations of classical AI to achieve superior performance while significantly downsizing the scale of AI models, even when using limited data.
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  •  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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  •  NEWS    Karl Berntorp gave Spotlight Talk at CDC Workshop on Gaussian Process Learning-Based Control
    Date: December 5, 2022
    Where: Cancun, Mexico
    MERL Contact: Karl Berntorp
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning
    Brief
    • Karl Berntorp was an invited speaker at the workshop on Gaussian Process Learning-Based Control organized at the Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2022 in Cancun, Mexico.

      The talk was part of a tutorial-style workshop aimed to provide insight into the fundamentals behind Gaussian processes for modeling and control and sketching some of the open challenges and opportunities using Gaussian processes for modeling and control. The talk titled ``Gaussian Processes for Learning and Control: Opportunities for Real-World Impact" described some of MERL's efforts in using Gaussian processes (GPs) for learning and control, with several application examples and discussing some of the key benefits and limitations with using GPs for learning-based control.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presenting five papers at NeurIPS 2022
    Date: November 29, 2022 - December 9, 2022
    Where: NeurIPS 2022
    MERL Contacts: Moitreya Chatterjee; Anoop Cherian; Michael J. Jones; Suhas Lohit
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL researchers are presenting 5 papers at the NeurIPS Conference, which will be held in New Orleans from Nov 29-Dec 1st, with virtual presentations in the following week. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning.

      MERL papers in NeurIPS 2022:

      1. “AVLEN: Audio-Visual-Language Embodied Navigation in 3D Environments” by Sudipta Paul, Amit Roy-Chowdhary, and Anoop Cherian

      This work proposes a unified multimodal task for audio-visual embodied navigation where the navigating agent can also interact and seek help from a human/oracle in natural language when it is uncertain of its navigation actions. We propose a multimodal deep hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for solving this challenging task that allows the agent to learn when to seek help and how to use the language instructions. AVLEN agents can interact anywhere in the 3D navigation space and demonstrate state-of-the-art performances when the audio-goal is sporadic or when distractor sounds are present.

      2. “Learning Partial Equivariances From Data” by David W. Romero and Suhas Lohit

      Group equivariance serves as a good prior improving data efficiency and generalization for deep neural networks, especially in settings with data or memory constraints. However, if the symmetry groups are misspecified, equivariance can be overly restrictive and lead to bad performance. This paper shows how to build partial group convolutional neural networks that learn to adapt the equivariance levels at each layer that are suitable for the task at hand directly from data. This improves performance while retaining equivariance properties approximately.

      3. “Learning Audio-Visual Dynamics Using Scene Graphs for Audio Source Separation” by Moitreya Chatterjee, Narendra Ahuja, and Anoop Cherian

      There often exist strong correlations between the 3D motion dynamics of a sounding source and its sound being heard, especially when the source is moving towards or away from the microphone. In this paper, we propose an audio-visual scene-graph that learns and leverages such correlations for improved visually-guided audio separation from an audio mixture, while also allowing predicting the direction of motion of the sound source.

      4. “What Makes a "Good" Data Augmentation in Knowledge Distillation - A Statistical Perspective” by Huan Wang, Suhas Lohit, Michael Jones, and Yun Fu

      This paper presents theoretical and practical results for understanding what makes a particular data augmentation technique (DA) suitable for knowledge distillation (KD). We design a simple metric that works very well in practice to predict the effectiveness of DA for KD. Based on this metric, we also propose a new data augmentation technique that outperforms other methods for knowledge distillation in image recognition networks.

      5. “FeLMi : Few shot Learning with hard Mixup” by Aniket Roy, Anshul Shah, Ketul Shah, Prithviraj Dhar, Anoop Cherian, and Rama Chellappa

      Learning from only a few examples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Recent approaches show benefits by learning a feature extractor on the abundant and labeled base examples and transferring these to the fewer novel examples. However, the latter stage is often prone to overfitting due to the small size of few-shot datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-based criteria to synthetically produce “hard” and useful data by mixing up real data samples. Our approach leads to state-of-the-art results on various computer vision few-shot benchmarks.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Researcher Kyeong Jin Kim organizes the second international workshop in 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
    Date: May 28, 2023 - June 1, 2023
    Where: Rome, Italy
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • Kyeong Jin Kim, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Connectivity & Information Processing Team, organizes the second international workshop in 2023 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 industry and academia such as Huawei Technology, University of South Florida, 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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  •  NEWS    MERL Researcher Interviewed by Globest.com about "High Tech Airflow Control for Smarter Energy Use"
    Date: August 25, 2022
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Saleh Nabi was interviewed by Globest.com regarding the use of airflow optimization for smarter energy use and disease prevention. The article titled "High Tech Airflow Control for Smarter Energy Use: Reducing costs and improving effectiveness means a lot of tricky math" was recently published and describes how the solutions to complex fluid dynamical equations leads to improved HVAC control.

      Globest.com is a trusted and independent team of experts providing commercial real estate professionals with comprehensive coverage and best practices necessary to innovate and build their businesses. More details about Globest can be found here: https://www.globest.com/static/about-us/
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  •  NEWS    Rien Quirynen gives invited talk at ELO-X Workshop on Embedded Optimization and Learning for Robotics and Mechatronics
    Date: October 10, 2022 - October 11, 2022
    Where: University of Freiburg, Germany
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
    Brief
    • Rien Quirynen is an invited speaker at an international workshop on Embedded Optimization and Learning for Robotics and Mechatronics, which is organized by the ELO-X project at the University of Freiburg in Germany. This talk, entitled "Embedded learning, optimization and predictive control for autonomous vehicles", presents recent results from multiple projects at MERL that leverage embedded optimization, machine learning and optimal control for autonomous vehicles.

      This workshop is part of the ELO-X Fall School and Workshop. Invited external lecturers will present state-of-the-art techniques and applications in the field of Embedded Optimization and Learning. ELO-X is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program.
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  •  NEWS    MERL launches Postdoctoral Research Fellow program
    Date: September 21, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) invites qualified postdoctoral candidates to apply for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This position provides early career scientists the opportunity to work at a unique, academically-oriented industrial research laboratory. Successful candidates will be expected to define and pursue their own original research agenda, explore connections to established laboratory initiatives, and publish high impact articles in leading venues. Please refer to our web page for further details.
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  •  NEWS    MERL congratulates Prof. Alex Waibel on receiving 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award
    Date: August 22, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • IEEE has announced that the recipient of the 2023 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award will be Prof. Alex Waibel (CMU/Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), “For pioneering contributions to spoken language translation and supporting technologies.” Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), which has become the new sponsor of this prestigious award in 2022, extends our warmest congratulations to Prof. Waibel.

      MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Dr. Chiori Hori, who worked with Dr. Waibel at Carnegie Mellon University and collaborated with him as part of national projects on speech summarization and translation, comments on his invaluable contributions to the field: “He has contributed not only to the invention of groundbreaking technology in speech and spoken language processing but also to the promotion of an abundance of research projects through international research consortiums by linking American, European, and Asian research communities. Many of his former laboratory members and collaborators are now leading R&D in the AI field.”

      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. This award has 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 field of speech and audio processing through its sponsorship of this award.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers win ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at 2022 American Control Conference
    Date: June 8, 2022
    Where: 2022 American Control Conference
    MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Christopher R. Laughman
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization
    Brief
    • Researchers from EPFL (Wenjie Xu, Colin Jones) and EMPA (Bratislav Svetozarevic), in collaboration with MERL researchers Ankush Chakrabarty and Chris Laughman, recently won the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at the 2022 American Control Conference for their work on "VABO: Violation-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Closed-Loop Performance Optimization with Unmodeled Constraints" out of 19 nominations and 3 finalists. The paper describes a data-driven framework for optimizing the performance of constrained control systems by systematically re-evaluating how cautiously/aggressively one should explore the search space to avoid sustained, large-magnitude constraint violations while tolerating small violations, and demonstrates these methods on a physics-based model of a vapor compression cycle.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented 9 papers at the American Control Conference (ACC)
    Date: June 8, 2022 - June 10, 2022
    Where: Atlanta, GA
    MERL Contacts: Karl Berntorp; Scott A. Bortoff; Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Abraham P. Vinod; Avishai Weiss
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Optimization
    Brief
    • At the American Control Conference in Atlanta, GA, MERL presented 9 papers on subjects including autonomous-vehicle decision making and motion planning, realtime Bayesian inference and learning, reference governors for hybrid systems, Bayesian optimization, and nonlinear control.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented 5 papers and an invited workshop talk at ICRA 2022
    Date: May 23, 2022 - May 27, 2022
    Where: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Pedro Miraldo; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) that was held in Philadelphia from May 23-27, 2022. The papers covered a broad range of topics from manipulation, tactile sensing, planning and multi-agent control. The invited talk was presented in the "Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Work of the Future" which covered some of the work done by MERL researchers on collaborative robotic assembly. The workshop was co-organized by MERL, Mitsubishi Electric Automation's North America Development Center (NADC), and MIT.
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  •  NEWS    MERL Scientists Presenting 5 Papers at IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2022
    Date: May 16, 2022 - May 20, 2022
    Where: Seoul, Korea
    MERL Contacts: Jianlin Guo; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Kieran Parsons; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • MERL Connectivity & Information Processing Team scientists remotely presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2022, held in Seoul Korea on May 16-20, 2022. Topics presented include recent advancements in communications technologies, deep learning methods, and quantum machine learning (QML). Presentation videos are also found on our YouTube channel. In addition, K. J. Kim organized "Industrial Private 5G-and-beyond Wireless Networks Workshop" at the conference.

      IEEE ICC is one of two IEEE Communications Society’s flagship conferences (ICC and Globecom). Each year, close to 2,000 attendees from over 70 countries attend IEEE ICC to take advantage of a program which consists of exciting keynote session, robust technical paper sessions, innovative tutorials and workshops, and engaging industry sessions. This 5-day event is known for bringing together audiences from both industry and academia to learn about the latest research and innovations in communications and networking technology, share ideas and best practices, and collaborate on future projects.
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  •  NEWS    Arvind Raghunathan's publication is Featured Article in the current issue of the INFORMS Journal on Computing
    Date: April 1, 2022
    Where: INFORMS Journal on Computing (https://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/ijoc)
    MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization
    Brief
    • Arvind Raghunathan co-authored a publication titled "JANOS: An Integrated Predictive and Prescriptive Modeling Framework" which has been chosen as a Featured Article in the current issue of the INFORMS Journal on Computing. The article was co-authored with Prof. David Bergman, a collaborator of MERL and Teng Huang, a former MERL intern, among others.

      The paper describes a new software tool, JANOS, that integrates predictive modeling and discrete optimization to assist decision making. Specifically, the proposed solver takes as input user-specified pretrained predictive models and formulates optimization models directly over those predictive models by embedding them within an optimization model through linear transformations.
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