- Date: October 28, 2017
Where: Venice, Italy
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Tim K. Marks will give an invited keynote talk at the 2017 IEEE Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG 2017). The workshop will take place On October 28, 2017, at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2017) in Venice, Italy.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, November 30, 2017; 4-6pm
Location: 201 Broadway, 8th floor, Cambridge, MA
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro Brief - Snacks, demos, science: On Thursday 11/30, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) will host an open house for graduate+ students interested in internships, post-docs, and research scientist positions. The event will be held from 4-6pm and will feature demos & short presentations in our main areas of research: algorithms, multimedia, electronics, communications, computer vision, speech processing, optimization, machine learning, data analytics, mechatronics, dynamics, control, and robotics. MERL is a high impact publication-oriented research lab with very extensive internship and university collaboration programs. Most internships lead to publication; many of our interns and staff have gone on to notable careers at MERL and in academia. Come mix with our researchers, see our state of the art technologies, and learn about our research opportunities. Dress code: casual, with resumes.
Pre-registration for the event is strongly encouraged:
https://merlopenhouse2.eventbrite.com/
Current internship and employment openings:
http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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- Date: September 17, 2017 - September 20, 2017
Where: Beijing, China
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Dehong Liu; Hassan Mansour; Huifang Sun; Anthony Vetro
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Computational Sensing, Digital Video
Brief - MERL presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), which was held in Beijing, China from September 17-20, 2017. ICIP is a flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and approximately 1300 people attended the event. Anthony Vetro served as General Co-chair for the conference.
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- Date: October 4, 2017 - October 6, 2017
Where: Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang Brief - Every year, women technologists and the best minds in computing convene to highlight the contributions of women to computing. The Anita Borg Institute co-presents GHC with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
The conference results in collaborative proposals, networking and mentoring for our attendees. Conference presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industry, academia and government.
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- Date: Thursday, June 1, 2017
Location: IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2017), Washington, DC
Speaker: Tim K. Marks
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Tim K. Marks will give the invited lunch talk on Thursday, June 1, at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2017). The talk is entitled "Robust Real-Time 3D Head Pose and 2D Face Alignment.".
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- Date & Time: Monday, July 10, 2017; 6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Location: David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh PA
Speaker: Andrew Knyazev and other panelists, MERL Brief - Andrew Knyazev accepted an invitation to represent MERL at the panel on Student Careers in Business, Industry and Government at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
The format consists of a five minute introduction by each of the panelists covering their background and an overview of the mathematical and computational challenges at their organization. The introductions will be followed by questions from the students.
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- Date: April 27, 2017
Where: Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim K. Marks presented an invited talk as part of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory CORE Seminar Series on Biometrics. The talk was entitled "Robust Real-Time 2D Face Alignment and 3D Head Pose Estimation."
Abstract: Head pose estimation and facial landmark localization are key technologies, with widespread application areas including biometrics and human-computer interfaces. This talk describes two different robust real-time face-processing methods, each using a different modality of input image. The first part of the talk describes our system for 3D head pose estimation and facial landmark localization using a commodity depth sensor. The method is based on a novel 3D Triangular Surface Patch (TSP) descriptor, which is viewpoint-invariant as well as robust to noise and to variations in the data resolution. This descriptor, combined with fast nearest-neighbor lookup and a joint voting scheme, enable our system to handle arbitrary head pose and significant occlusions. The second part of the talk describes our method for face alignment, which is the localization of a set of facial landmark points in a 2D image or video of a face. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a Mixture of Invariant eXperts (MIX), where each expert learns a regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. We also present a method to include deformation constraints within the discriminative alignment framework, which makes the algorithm more robust. Both our 3D head pose and 2D face alignment methods outperform the previous results on standard datasets. If permitted, I plan to end the talk with a live demonstration.
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- Date: April 10, 2017
Where: University of Utah School of Computing
MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Tim K. Marks presented an invited talk at the University of Utah School of Computing, entitled "Action Detection from Video and Robust Real-Time 2D Face Alignment."
Abstract: The first part of the talk describes our multi-stream bi-directional recurrent neural network for action detection from video. In addition to a two-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) on full-frame appearance (images) and motion (optical flow), our system trains two additional streams on appearance and motion that have been cropped to a bounding box from a person tracker. To model long-term temporal dynamics within and between actions, the multi-stream CNN is followed by a bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer. Our method outperforms the previous state of the art on two action detection datasets: the MPII Cooking 2 Dataset, and a new MERL Shopping Dataset that we have made available to the community. The second part of the talk describes our method for face alignment, which is the localization of a set of facial landmark points in a 2D image or video of a face. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a Mixture of Invariant eXperts (MIX), where each expert learns a regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. We also present a method to include deformation constraints within the discriminative alignment framework, which makes the algorithm more robust. Our face alignment system outperforms the previous results on standard datasets. The talk will end with a live demo of our face alignment system.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, March 28, 2017; 1:30 - 5:30PM
Location: Google (355 Main St., 5th Floor, Cambridge MA)
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro; Richard C. (Dick) Waters; Jinyun Zhang Brief - How will AI and robotics reshape the economy and create new opportunities (and challenges) across industries? Who are the hottest companies that will compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Uber to create the future? And what are New England innovators doing to strengthen the local cluster and help lead the national discussion?
MERL will be participating in Xconomy's third annual conference on AI and robotics in Boston to address these questions. MERL President & CEO, Dick Waters, will be on a panel discussing the status and future of self-driving vehicles. Lab members will also be on hand demonstrate and discuss recent advances AI and robotics technology.
The agenda and registration for the event can be found online: https://xconomyforum85.eventbrite.com.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, January 17, 2017; 6:00 pm
Location: 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
Speaker: Tim Marks, Esra Cansizoglu and Carl Vondrick, MERL and MIT
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - MERL was pleased to host the Boston Imaging and Vision Meetup held on January 17. The meetup is an informal gathering of people interested in the field of computer imaging and vision. According to the group's website "the meetup provides an opportunity for the image processing/computer vision community to network, socialize and learn". The event held at MERL featured three speakers, Tim Marks and Esra Cansizoglu from MERL, as well as Carl Vondrick, an MIT CS graduate student in the group of Prof. Antonio Torralba. Roughly 70 people attended to eat pizza, hear the speakers and network.
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- Date: March 5, 2017 - March 9, 2017
Where: New Orleans
MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux; Dehong Liu; Hassan Mansour; Anthony Vetro; Ye Wang
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Computational Sensing, Digital Video, Information Security, Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL researchers will presented 10 papers at the upcoming IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP), to be held in New Orleans from March 5-9, 2017. Topics to be presented include recent advances in speech recognition and audio processing; graph signal processing; computational imaging; and privacy-preserving data analysis.
ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event attracts more than 2000 participants each year.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 8, 2016; 4:00-7:00pm
Location: 201 Broadway, 8th Floor, Cambridge, MA
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro Brief - Snacks, demos, science: On Thursday 12/8, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) will host an open house for graduate+ students interested in internships, post-docs, and research scientist positions. The event will be held from 4-7pm and will feature demos & short presentations in our main areas of research: algorithms, multimedia, electronics, communications, computer vision, speech processing, optimization, machine learning, data analytics, mechatronics, dynamics, control, and robotics. MERL is a high impact publication-oriented research lab with very extensive internship and university collaboration programs. Most internships lead to publication; many of our interns and staff have gone on to notable careers at MERL and in academia. Come mix with our researchers, see our state of the art technologies, and learn about our research opportunities. Dress code: casual, with resumes.
Pre-registration for the event is strongly encouraged:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/merl-open-house-tickets-29408503626
Current internship and employment openings:
http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, November 16, 2016; 3:30-6:30pm
Location: Sheraton Commander (16 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA)
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL will be participating in the Engineering Career Fair Collaborative, which is being held on November 16, 2016 at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge from 3:30-6:30pm. Graduate students with an interest in learning about internship and other employment opportunities at MERL are invited to visit our booth. Staff members will be on hand to discuss current openings. We will also be showing some demonstrations of current research projects.
Current internship and employment openings:
http://www.merl.com/internship/openings
http://www.merl.com/employment/employment.
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- Date: June 27, 2016 - June 30, 2016
Where: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Las Vegas, NV
MERL Contacts: Michael J. Jones; Tim K. Marks
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researchers in the Computer Vision group presented three papers at the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2016), which had a paper acceptance rate of 29.9%.
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- Date & Time: Friday, July 22, 2016; 12:00 Noon
Location: Cambridge Brewery
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang Brief - MERL hosted its 2nd Annual "Women In Science Celebration". MERL's current team of female interns discussed and celebrated the contributions they've made during their internships at MERL.
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, July 13, 2016; 2:30 PM - 3:30
Speaker: Richard Lehoucq, Sandia National Laboratories
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Digital Video, Machine Learning
Abstract 
My presentation considers the research question of whether existing algorithms and software for the large-scale sparse eigenvalue problem can be applied to problems in spectral graph theory. I first provide an introduction to several problems involving spectral graph theory. I then provide a review of several different algorithms for the large-scale eigenvalue problem and briefly introduce the Anasazi package of eigensolvers.
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- Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL celebrated 25 years of innovation on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. The event was a great success, with inspiring keynote talks, insightful panel sessions, and an exciting research showcase of MERL's latest breakthroughs.
Please visit the event page to view photos of each session, video presentations, as well as a commemorative booklet that highlights past and current research.
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- Date & Time: Friday, May 13, 2016; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Oleg Iliev, Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics, ITWM
Research Area: Dynamical Systems
Abstract 
Li-ion batteries are widely used in automotive industry, in electronic devices, etc. In this talk we will discuss challenges related to the multiscale nature of batteries, mainly the understanding of processes in the porous electrodes at pore scale and at macroscale. A software tool for simulation of isothermal and non-isothermal electrochemical processes in porous electrodes will be presented. The pore scale simulations are done on 3D images of porous electrodes, or on computer generated 3D microstructures, which have the same characterization as real porous electrodes. Finite Volume and Finite Element algorithms for the highly nonlinear problems describing processes at pore level will be shortly presented. Model order reduction, MOR, empirical interpolation method, EIM-MOR algorithms for acceleration of the computations will be discussed, as well as the reduced basis method for studying parameters dependent problems. Next, homogenization of the equations describing the electrochemical processes at the pore scale will be presented, and the results will be compared to the engineering approach based on Newman's 1D+1D model. Simulations at battery cell level will also be addressed. Finally, the challenges in modeling and simulation of degradation processes in the battery will be discussed and our first simulation results in this area will be presented.
This is joint work with A.Latz (DLR), M.Taralov, V.Taralova, J.Zausch, S.Zhang from Fraunhofer ITWM, Y.Maday from LJLL, Paris 6 and Y.Efendiev from Texas A&M.
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- Date: Thursday, June 2, 2016
Location: Norton's Woods Conference Center at American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Anthony Vetro Brief - A celebration event to mark MERL's 25th anniversary will be held on Thursday, June 2 at the Norton's Woods Conference Center at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA. This event will feature keynote talks, panel sessions, and a research showcase. The event itself is invitation-only, but videos and other highlights will be made available online. Further details about the program can be obtained at the link below.
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- Date: December 14, 2015 - December 16, 2015
Where: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher, Oncel Tuzel, gave a keynote talk at 2016 International Symposium on Visual Computing in Las Vegas, Dec. 16, 2015. The talk was titled: "Machine vision for robotic bin-picking: Sensors and algorithms" and reviewed MERL's research in the application of 2D and 3D sensing and machine learning to the problem of general pose estimation.
The talk abstract was: For over four years, at MERL, we have worked on the robot "bin-picking" problem: using a 2D or 3D camera to look into a bin of parts and determine the pose, 3D rotation and translation, of a good candidate to pick up. We have solved the problem several different ways with several different sensors. I will briefly describe the sensors and the algorithms. In the first half of the talk, I will describe the Multi-Flash camera, a 2D camera with 8 flashes, and explain how this inexpensive camera design is used to extract robust geometric features, depth edges and specular edges, from the parts in a cluttered bin. I will present two pose estimation algorithms, (1) Fast directional chamfer matching--a sub-linear time line matching algorithm and (2) specular line reconstruction, for fast and robust pose estimation of parts with different surface characteristics. In the second half of the talk, I will present a voting-based pose estimation algorithm applicable to 3D sensors. We represent three-dimensional objects using a set of oriented point pair features: surface points with normals and boundary points with directions. I will describe a max-margin learning framework to identify discriminative features on the surface of the objects. The algorithm selects and ranks features according to their importance for the specified task which leads to improved accuracy and reduced computational cost.
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- Date: December 15, 2015
Where: 2015 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
MERL Contact: Hassan Mansour
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - MERL researcher Andrew Knyazev gave 3 talks at the 2015 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). The papers were published in IEEE conference proceedings.
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- Date: October 25, 2015
Where: Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - Teng-Yok Lee served as the poster co-chair for the Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) workshop at IEEEVis 2015 in Chicago, Oct. 25-30. At IEEEVis there were over 2000 attendees and three highly competitive main subconferences (SciVis, InfoVis, and Visual Analytics and Technology (VAST)).
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- Date: September 30, 2015
Awarded to: Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (MELCO) advertisements based on 3D reconstruction received a Gold medal and a Bronze medal in the Fujisankei Newspaper. "Will I fit?", "He'll fit just fine.", and "Oops, did you think in 3D?".
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, August 4, 2015; 12:00
Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
MERL Contacts: Elizabeth Phillips; Jinyun Zhang Brief - To celebrate "Women in Science at MERL," a luncheon event was organized on August 4. Eleven female interns, three female researchers, and female members of HQ staff, interns, hosts/managers and MERL executives participated in that event. All female interns introduced their research projects and their positive experiences at MERL; female researchers shared their own career development stories; and at the end all discussed how to be successful in the field of science. Every participant was inspired to continue contributing to the future of science.
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- Date: July 13, 2015 - July 17, 2015
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - SA group members (M. Liu, S. Lin (intern), S. Ramalingam, O. Tuzel) presented a paper at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Rome July 13-17 called 'Layered Interpretation of Street View Images'. The results they reported are now listed as the leader of the benchmark competition sponsored by Daimler. [Note that at that URL ref 2 is from collaboration with Daimler and it uses a FPGA for high speed, whereas MERL result is obtained with desktop computer and GPU.].
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