CRV 2013 Invited Speakers

This year we have four excellent speakers. Please see below for details.

Stefan Williams, University of Sydney

Abstract: AUVs for Environmental Monitoring: This talk will examine recent developments in marine imaging from Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), with a particular emphasis on novel imaging system design, visual navigation and mapping and clustering and classification of the resulting imagery. We provide a brief overview of Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) program that is facilitating the establishment of benthic reference sites around the country. These sites are revisited on an annual basis to monitor changes in marine habitats by exploiting developments in high resolution mapping using stereo imagery data collected by the AUV systems. We also briefly touch on recent challenges related to measuring change and transforming the resulting data into information suitable for the study of marine environments. We conclude with a few thoughts on the direction of future benthic observing programs and the potential role of long range AUV systems in cost-effectively improving our understanding of the oceans.

Bio: Stefan B. Williams is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney's School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering. He is a member of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics where he leads the Marine Robotics group. He is also the head of Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Facility. His research interests include Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping in unstructured underwater environments using visual and acoustic sensing, autonomous navigation and control and classification and clustering of large volumes of data collected by robotic systems. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2002 and completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1997.

Larry Matthies, NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Abstract: Autonomous Visual Navigation Systems for Flying Vehicles on Earth and in Space: Planetary exploration requires onboard vision systems for autonomous flying vehicles in several contexts. These include safe and precise landing on Mars, mapping and relative state estimation for low-altitude flight in close proximity to comets or asteroids, and navigating balloons in the atmosphere of Titan. On Earth, micro air vehicles need very closely related capabilities for onboard state estimation, obstacle avoidance, mapping, and landing site detection for a variety of applications, including indoor and outdoor reconnaissance and inspection. This talk will describe recent progress on vision-based state estimation, obstacle avoidance, and landing site detection for flying vehicles for Earth and space applications, as well as a brief update on the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Bio: Larry Matthies is a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is the Supervisor of the Computer Vision Group in the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section. His also an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California and is a member of the editorial boards for the Autonomous Robots journal and the Journal of Field Robotics.

Dieter Fox, University of Washington

Abstract: Grounding Natural Language in Robot Control and Perception Systems: Robots are becoming more and more capable at reasoning about people, objects, and activities in their environments. The ability to extract high-level semantic information from sensor data provides new opportunities for human robot interaction. One such opportunity is to explore interacting with robots via natural language. In this talk I will present our recent work toward enabling robots to interpret, or ground, natural language commands in robot control systems. We build on techniques developed by the semantic natural language processing community on learning combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs) that parse natural language input to logic-based semantic meaning. I will demonstrate results in two application domains: First, learning to follow natural language directions through indoor environments; and, second, learning to ground object attributes via weakly supervised training.

Joint work with Luke Zettlemoyer, Cynthia Matuszek, Nicolas Fitzgerald, Yuyin Sun, and Liefeng Bo. Support provided by Intel ISTC-PC, NSF, and ARL, and ONR.

Bio: Dieter Fox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he heads the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab. From 2009 to 2011, he was also Director of the Intel Research Labs Seattle. He currently serves as the academic PI of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing hosted at UW. Dieter obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany. Before going to UW, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the CMU Robot Learning Lab. Fox's research is in artificial intelligence, with a focus on state estimation applied to robotics and activity recognition. He has published over 100 technical papers and is co-author of the text book Probabilistic Robotics. He is a fellow of the AAAI and received several best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences. He is also an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and was program co-chair of the 2008 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He currently serves as the program chair of the 2013 Robotics Science and Systems conference.

Wolfgang Heidrich, University of British Columbia

Abstract: Shape Reconstruction of Transparent Objects: While the 3D acquisition of opaque surfaces with Lambertian reflectance is a well-studied problem, transparent, refractive, specular and potentially dynamic scenes pose challenging problems for acquisition systems. In this talk I will discuss a range of computational photography approaches to acquire the shape of transparent solids, liquids, and gases, ranging from surface models of static solids to full volumetric reconstructions of gas flows.

Bio: Professor Wolfgang Heidrich holds the Dolby Research Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen in 1999, and then worked as a Research Associate in the Computer Graphics Group of the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrucken, Germany, before joining UBC in 2000. Heidrich's research interests lie at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, imaging, and optics. In particular, he has worked on High Dynamic Range imaging and display, image-based modeling, measuring, and rendering, geometry acquisition, GPU-based rendering, and global illumination. Heidrich has written over 100 refereed publications on these subjects and has served on numerous program committees. He was the program co-chair for Graphics Hardware 2002, Graphics Interface 2004, and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2006, and PROCAMS 2010.