Friday, September 30, 2005

東京車展搶先報─SUBARU IVX-II 安全駕駛輔助系統(VIP ONLY)

http://www.autonet.com.tw/cgi-bin/news/news_view4mail.cgi?qry=a5090673



AUTONET記者:李承儒

這套裝置於Legacy Wagon上展示的IVX-II安全駕駛輔助系統,利用車頭的雷達系統與擋風玻璃上的一對立體顯像攝影機偵查車況,計算前車距離、相對速度與航道偏離距離等參數,藉由電腦判斷是否造成危險,適時主動介入控制車速與轉向,讓車輛維持最安全的行車狀態,而油門、煞車與轉向系統也都導入線傳控制技術,再配合SUBARU拿手的四輪傳動系統,經電腦計算給予最佳化的轉向角度與動力輸出,降低因駕駛不當駕駛所發生的危險。

此外該系統也與RTK GPS高精密的衛星導航相結合,可精準判斷車輛的位置,提前提供前方路況,以迴避前方危險。SUBARU將持續投入該系統的研究,以期未來能落實於量產車上。






NIPS 2005 Workshop on Machine Learning Based Robotics in Unstructured Environments

December 10, 2005
Whistler, British Columbia
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~janem/NipsMLR.html

Important Dates:
  • Oct. 17, 2005 : Paper Submission
  • Nov. 15, 2005 : Author notification
  • Dec. 10, 2005 : Workshop at Whistler

Thursday, September 29, 2005

CNN: Robotic patients help train doctors


Wednesday, September 28, 2005; Posted: 9:59 a.m. EDT (13:59 GMT)

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- Faced with a growing number of medical students and few training hospitals, a Mexican university is turning to robotic patients to better train future doctors.

Mexico City's UNAM University has opened the world's largest "robotic hospital" -- where medical students practice on everything from delivering a baby from a robotic dummy to injecting the arm of a plastic toddler.

The robots are dummies complete with mechanical organs, synthetic blood and mechanical breathing systems. More...

Stanford seminar.

Broad Area Colloquium for Artificial Intelligence, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics and Computer Vision
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

This colloquium is intended to bring established and senior researchers from the fields of AI, Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Computer Vision, to discuss and explain broad considerations and high-level tasks that the relevant communities are addressing. The talks are intended to create awareness and interest for all of the members of these communities, hopefully bridging the gaps and creating collaborations.

MIT Robotics Seminar: Automatic Synthesis of Fine-Motion Strategies

Speaker: Tomas Lozano-Perez , CSAIL, MIT
Date: Tuesday, October 4 2005

Tomas will present a historical perspective on motion planning and discuss his paper Automatic Synthesis of Fine-Motion Strategies (co-authored with Matt Mason and Russ Taylor). The paper is available to download here:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/5640/2/AIM-759.pdf

MIT Robotics Seminar: Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to Explore the World

Speaker: Hanumant Singh ,
Date: Tuesday, September 27 2005
Relevant URL: http://www.whoi.edu/sites/hsingh

Abstract:
We currently have better maps of the far side of the moon than of our own planet. This talk looks at the emerging robotic technologies and sensor networks that should help us obtain high resolution optical, acoustic, and chemical descriptions of the oceanic environment in the context of spatial and temporal mapping for answering long term questions associated with marine benthic habitat characterization, climate change, marine geological and geophysical studies, and deep water archaeology.

Specifically this talk focusses on the design and use of AUVs, within the multidimensional and often conflicting constraints associated with acoustic mapping, acoustic communications, inertial and acoustic navigation systems, optical imaging and chemical sensing. We present our work in the context of real world data acquired using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) working in diverse applications including coral reef surveys off Puerto Rico and gas blowout sites in the Mid-Atlantic with the Seabed AUV, a forensic survey of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic at a depth of 4100 meters using the Hercules ROV and a survey of the TAG hydrothermal vent area in the mid-Atlantic at a depth of 2600m using the Jason II ROV.

CMU RI Seminar:MRF's for MRI's: Bayesian Reconstruction of MR Images via Graph Cuts

Ramin Zabih

ABSTRACT: Markov Random Fields (MRF's) are a very effective way to impose spatial smoothness in computer vision. I will describe an application of MRF's to a non-traditional but important problem in medical imaging: the reconstruction of MR images from raw fourier data. This can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, where the goal is to find a spatially smooth solution while permitting discontinuities. Although it is easy to apply MRF's for MR reconstruction, the resulting energy minimization problem poses some interesting challenges. It lies outside of the class of energy functions that can be straightforwardly minimized with graph cuts. I will show how graph cuts can nonetheless be adapted to solve this problem, and demonstrate some preliminary results that are extremely promising.

Joint work with Ashish Raj and Gurmeet Singh

BIO: Ramin Zabih is an associate professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests focus on discrete optimization methods and their applications, especially in early vision and medical imaging. Since 2000 he has also held a joint appointment in the Radiology Department of Cornell's Weill Medical College. He is best known for his work on energy minimization via graph cuts, which is the basis for most of the top-performing stereo algorithms. Two of his papers on this topic received Best Paper awards at the European Conference on Computer Vision in 2002. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and is Program Co-chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

CMU RI Thesis Proposal: Activity Recognition for Physically-Embodied Agent Teams

Gita Sukthankar
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

This thesis focuses on the problem of activity recognition for physically-embodied agent teams. We define team activity recognition as the process of identifying team behaviors from traces of agents' positions and orientations as they evolve over time; the goal is to completely annotate agent traces with: 1) the correct sequence of low-level actions performed by each agent; 2) an assignment of agents to teams and subteams; 3) the set of team plans consistent with the observed sequence. Activity traces are gathered from teams of humans or agents performing military tasks in urban environments. Team behavior annotations can be used for a wide variety of applications including virtual training environments, visual monitoring systems, and commentator agents.

For many physical domains, coordinated team behaviors create distinctive spatio-temporal patterns that can be used to identify low-level action sequences; we demonstrate that this can be done in a way that is robust to spatial variations in the environment and human deviations during behavior execution. This thesis addresses the novel problem of agent-to-team assignment for team tasks where team composition, the mapping of agents into teams, changes over time; this allows the analysis of more complicated tasks in which agents must periodically divide into subteams. To do this, we introduce a new algorithm, Simultaneous Team Assignment and Behavior Recognition (STABR), that generates low-level action annotations from spatio-temporal agent traces. Finally, we extend methods in symbolic plan recognition to exploit both temporal constraints between behaviors and agent role constraints in team plans to reduce the number of state history hypotheses that our system must consider.

Further Details

A copy of the thesis proposal document can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~gitars/Papers/proposal.pdf.

CMU CFR Seminar: Nonholonomic Distance to Polygonal Obstacles for a Car-Like Robot

Who: Marilena Vendittelli
When: 4:30 PM, Tuesday 9/27

Abstract: The motion of wheeled mobile robots is subject to nonholonomic constraints deriving from the wheels' pure rolling hypothesis. A well known consequence is that any path in the configuration space is not necessarily feasible for these systems. For this reason the euclidean metric is not appropriate for determining the distance to obstacles in the robot environment. In this talk, we define and show how to compute a distance between the robot and the obstacles which takes into account the nonholonomic constraints.

Contact:
Visiting faculty at the Robotics Institute until Dec 2005.
E-mail: venditt@dis.uniroma1.it
http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~labrob/people/vendittelli/venditt.html

CMU AI seminar: A Geometric Perspective on Learning Theory and Algorithms

Who: Partha Niyogi
When: 3:30 Tuesday, 11/1/2005

Title: A Geometric Perspective on Learning Theory and Algorithms

Abstract: Increasingly, we face machine learning problems in very high dimensional spaces. We proceed with the intuition that although natural data lives in very high dimensions, they have relatively few degrees of freedom. One way to formalize this intuition is to model the data as lying on or near a low dimensional manifold embedded in the high dimensional space. This point of view leads to a new class of algorithms that are "manifold motivated" and a new set of theoretical questions that surround their analysis. A central construction in these algorithms is a graph or simplicial complex that is data-derived and we will relate the geometry of these to the geometry of the underlying manifold. Applications to embedding, clustering, classification, and semi-supervised learning will be considered.

webpage: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~niyogi

Mini-Bio: Partha Niyogi is Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at The University of Chicago. His research interests are in the general area of artificial intelligence with a particular focus on problems in machine learning, speech, and computational linguistics. He has a B.Tech. from IIT, Delhi, and SM. and Ph.D. from MIT.

CNN: Robots ready to race in Grand Challenge


Winner to receive $2 million prize
Monday, September 26, 2005; Posted: 12:17 p.m. EDT (16:17 GMT)
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Wanted by the Pentagon: A muscular, outdoorsy specimen. Must be intelligent and, above all, self-driven.
When 20 hulking robotic vehicles face off next month in a rugged race across the Nevada desert, the winning machine (if any crosses the finish line) will blend the latest technological bling and the most smarts. More...

Sunday, September 25, 2005

CMU FRC Seminar: Subspace Methods for Vision, Graphics and Signal Processing

Speaker: Fernando De la Torre
Date: Thursday, September 29
Abstract:
Subspace methods (e.g. Principal Component Analysis, Independent Component Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis, ...) have been successfully applied in numerous visual, graphics and signal processing tasks over the last two decades. In this talk, I will provide a unified framework for several novel component-analysis techniques useful for modeling, classifying and clustering huge amounts of high dimensional data. In particular, I will describe five novel component-analysis techniques:
1) Robust parameterized component Analysis (RPCA): Extension of principal component analysis (PCA) to build a linear model robust to outliers and invariant to geometric transformations.
2) Multimodal Oriented Component Analysis (MODA): Generalization of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) optimal for Gaussian multimodal classes with different covariances.
3) Representational Oriented Component Analysis (ROCA): Extension of OCA to improve classification accuracy when few training samples are available (e.g. just 1 training sample).
4) Discriminative Cluster Analysis (DCA): Unsupervised low dimensional reduction method that finds a subspace well suited for k-means clustering.
5) Dynamic Couple Component Analysis (DCCA): Generalization of PCA method to learn relations between multiple high dimensional data sets in presence of limited training data.
I will discuss how these techniques can be applied to visual tracking, signal modeling (e.g. background estimation, virtual avatars) and pattern recognition problems (e.g. face recognition), as well as clustering long term multimodal data (video, audio, body sensors) useful to monitor our daily activity.

References of my talk (9/28)

Hi, folks

These two paper are really good ones which are about scan matching.

  • A method for registration of 3-D shapes.pdf

  • Robot pose estimation in unknown enviroments by matching 2D Range Scans.pdf

    -tailion
  • To follow up Nelson's posts...



    Saturday, September 24, 2005

    本田的車間通信技術 還將應用於新一代AFS等領域

    http://china5.nikkeibp.co.jp/china/news/auto/auto200509060122.html

    【日經BP社報道】
    本田日前發佈了安全試驗車“Honda ASV-3”。在日本國土交通省推進的第3個ASV計劃中,利用車間通信提高駕駛安全性是一大主題。“Honda ASV-3”通過在攝像頭及雷達獲取到的資訊的基礎上增加車間通信,實現了對車輛及行人的預測功能、提高了安全性。

      車間通信使用ETC(自動收費系統)等也在使用的5.8GHz頻帶,可在車輛之間交換車輛的位置、速度及車型等資訊。最大輸出功率為10mW,可通信距離在市區時雖然只有大約200m,在郊區則最長可達到800m左右。主要通過GPS(全球定位系統)獲得的位置資訊來判斷車輛的相互位置、起到防衝撞作用。不過,GPS的檢測精度並不是太高,“在市區有時會出現大約10m的誤差”(會場解說員),因此,為了判斷正確的位置,還配套使用了攝像頭及雷達等。

      “Honda ASV-3”除預防衝撞外,還在AFS(自適應前燈系統)以及調整彎道駕駛速度等方面應用了車間通信。另外,當無法使用手機進行緊急通報時,也可利用車間通信。此次公開的主要車間通信功能如下。(記者:田知本 史朗)

    ●右轉彎時提供對向車輛資訊的系統:除位置及車速外,還可交換“行駛方向”資訊。摩托車還可利用顯示器及聲音傳達接近車輛的情況。

    ●十字路口暫時停車及再起動輔助系統:可交換位置資訊,並在再次起動時對安全確認進行輔助。十字路口的資訊通過導航儀顯示,而標識及標示則通過攝像頭識別。

    ●正面衝撞事故防止輔助系統:除位置及車速外,還可交換“操舵角”資訊,當有可能與對向車輛的行車路線衝突時,就會發出警告。除向車輪施加反方向的力(使用助力方向盤)外,還會振動內置有致動器的油門踏板、向駕駛員發出警告。

    ●彎道進入速度輔助系統:可獲取前方車輛的位置、車速資訊。通過導航儀資訊獲得彎道彎曲率、自動實施減速。

    ●車間維持輔助系統:可獲得前方車輛及隨後的減速資訊。當超過速度過快時,便會通過聲音發出警告。同時使用雷達。

    ●新一代AFS:在交換位置資訊後,如果沒有對向車輛,便會切換至高光燈。高光燈自動切換裝置由美國Gentex公司等銷售,此前則是通過攝像頭來識別前方車輛及對向車輛。

    ●行人檢測系統:行人也帶有通信裝置的人車通信。為了提高位置資訊的精度,配套使用了攝像頭。

    ●車間通信器。頻率為5.8GHz,輸出功率為10mW。傳輸速度為4.096Mbps。在進行人車通信實驗時,內置有乾電池,並為行人使用進行了改進。

    ●車間通信用天線。
      

    本田發佈先進安全試驗汽車及摩托車

    【日經BP社報道】

    http://china5.nikkeibp.co.jp/china/news/auto/auto200509060121.html
      本田2005年9月2日發佈了面向日本國土交通省推進的“ASV-3項目”的安全試驗車“Honda ASV-3”。該車除配備了項目主題的車間通信功能外,還配備有利用攝像頭及雷達的接近車輛及行人檢測系統,以及發生事故時的緊急通報功能等。ASV不僅開發了汽車,而且還開發了配備後方攝像頭的摩托車。

      車間通信系統除可在汽車之間外,還可與摩托車及行人交換位置資訊。通過在導航儀上顯示正在接近的車輛的狀況、利用聲音警告正在接近,可以防止攝像頭與雷達難以發現的事故,比如,經過路口及右拐時與衝出路口的其他車輛相撞。

      另外,還配備有使用CCD攝像頭、鐳射雷達、毫米波雷達的行人檢測系統,以及檢測到橫穿馬路的行人後發出警報的功能。

      該車具備發生事故時發送緊急通報的功能,即可使用手機向處理中心發送車輛位置、車型、安全氣囊的工作狀況及駕駛員的狀況等資訊。比如,可發送事故發生前5秒內及事故發生後10秒內的駕駛員的影像,以及通過座席下的生物感測器檢測到的心跳和呼吸數據。

      本田計劃參加日本國土交通省實施的“ASV-3”檢測實驗(2005年7月4日~10月28日),以及預定在北海道舉行的公開實驗(10月12日~13日)。(記者:林 達彥)

    Advance Pre-Safe:賓士汽車S-class的新安全系統

    作者:駐芝加哥科技組 現職:駐芝加哥科技組
    文章來源:駐芝加哥科技組
    發佈時間:94.09.22

    置於車輛前方的感測器可以偵測出危險狀況,更可以操作剎車系統。

    為了避免猛撞前面的汽車而損毁一部價值九萬美元的豪華汽車,賓士車廠在2007年S級轎車的設計上增加了一種類似千里眼的安全系統,這種定名為 Advance Pre-Safe的安全系統可以預測甚至防止可能發生的撞擊。它利用電達探測前端道路的狀況,當它查覺到前面有障礙物的時候就會發出警報,如果駕駛人沒有 注意到警示,而S-class判斷撞擊無法避免的時候,Pre-Safe系統就會為最壞的情況做準備。這時,剎車會運作、座椅帶子會拉緊、車邊和車頂的窗 子都會關緊、移動的駕駛座會回歸它原來的位置。即使駕駛人踩剎車踩的太輕微,安全系統也會增加到足夠的力量使車輛停下來。以前的賓士Pre-Safe安全 系統則只有在駕駛人突然轉彎或是猛踩剎車,眼看即將發生車禍的時候才會拉紧座椅帶子以及移動seatbacks歸位。

    一般人可能因為S-class太貴買不起,但是至少被後面車輛追撞的機會減少了。

    Friday, September 23, 2005

    iSpace seminar

    > From: Polly Huang [mailto:phuang@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw]
    > Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 5:23 PM
    > To: group@nslab.ee.ntu.edu.tw;
    > lab336_mll@mll.csie.ntu.edu.tw; ispace-pi@nslab.ee.ntu.edu.tw
    > Subject: ispace seminar 2005 fall

    Hi all,

    hope we are all charged up and ready for the new semester.
    Here are couple things to note about iSpace seminar.

    1. We'll cancel iSpace seminar that is supposed to be on this Friday. The new iSpace seminar time for the semester is set to Tuesday noon 12:30-2:00. We'll begin from next Tuesday 9/27.

    2. Bob has kindly agreed to take over the duty of coordinating the seminar. (Thanks, Bob!)

    cheers,

    -Polly
    -----------------------
    - I have reserved CSIE 310 (the original seminar room) for the ispace seminar on Tuesday noon (12:30 ~ 2:00).

    - Given that current listed papers are more focused on user interfaces (papers from CHI 2006), please feel free to add any other papers of your interest in the seminar and we can push these CHI papers back.

    Thanks,

    Hao

    Thursday, September 22, 2005

    Postdoctoral Post at Oxford University

    Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Mobile Robotics.

    Applications are invited from suitably qualified candidates for the above position. This post is available initially for 12 months with an anticipated continuation of up to three years.

    The successful candidate will have a doctoral degree in estimation, mobile robotics, computer vision or a closely related area in computer science and an understanding of the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) problem and contemporary approaches. You will also need to have a strong familiarity with optimisation techniques especially those commonly used for tasks in computer vision. Excellent proven ability in software writing and debugging skills in C++ and Matlab, demonstrated ability to work as part of a team, experience in validation of algorithms using real data and the ability to work to deadlines are essential. A background in computer vision/robotics, a knowledge of systems engineering and a desire to to work in an energetic group of researchers are highly desirable.

    The starting salary will be in the RA1A scale £19460 - £23643

    Further particulars may be obtained from www.eng.ox.ac.uk or Mr C J Scotcher, The Senior Administrator, University of Oxford, Department of Engineering Science, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PJ, or by email to administrator@eng.ox.ac.uk ; to whom written applications should be made enclosing a curriculum vitae and the names and addresses of two referees.

    Please quote DF05066 in all correspondence.

    The closing date for applications is 30th September 2005

    Robotics Faculty position at Duke University

    ASSISTANT OR ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
    DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING AND MATERIALS SCIENCE PRATT
    SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

    The Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University is currently undergoing a period of significant growth in human and physical resources driven by a highly successful Capital Campaign and a transforming endowment to name the Engineering school.

    The Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science invites applications for tenure-track faculty positions. A tenure- track appointment at the Assistant or Associate Professor level is anticipated, but appointments at the Full Professor level with tenure are available for exceptional applicants. Applications are invited from candidates with research interests in one of the following areas: nano-mechanics, autonomous vehicles and robotic systems, and energy technology including traditional and alternative energy sources. Applications will also be accepted for allied mechanical engineering disciplines such as vehicle dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and control, MEMS devices, sensor technology, small and micro-scale propulsion systems, thermal sciences, aerodynamics and aeroelasticity.

    Successful candidates are expected to establish a vibrant research program, obtain competitive external research funding, and participate actively in teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

    Applicants should submit a cover letter describing their research interests and qualifications, a curriculum vitae, and the names and addresses of three references. Please submit your application to mems- search@mems.duke.edu as a PDF (preferred) or Word file attached to your email. Duke University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

    Wednesday, September 21, 2005

    94/9/26(一)4:30-6:00PM張系國博士演講訊息

    Title: A chronorobot for time and knowledge exchange and management.
    Next Monday, 4:30pm, in 博理館101演講廳.

    Tuesday, September 20, 2005

    CMU VASC seminar: Pedestrian Detection with Thermopiles and Short Range Radars

    Dirk Linzmeier
    DaimlerChrysler

    Abstract:
    Automotive pedestrian protection systems will be introduced in the EU in short term to reduce the number of accidents and injury fatalities. As with any safety issue, a comprehensive approach comprising both active and passive safety elements should be followed. This is also valid for pedestrian protection, where it has been shown that next to purely passive measures, accident avoidance systems e.g. the Brake Assist have significant potential to reduce injury severity. Passive safety short term solutions can be contact sensor systems that trigger raisable engine hoods. However, an important enabler for a future pedestrian protection system is a suitable, low-cost, environment-friendly sensing technology for pedestrian detection, supported by a fast and reliable algorithm for object localization.
    This talk discusses such an innovative approach for pedestrian detection and localization, by presenting a system based on two short range radars and an array of passive infrared thermopile sensors, aided with probabilistic techniques for detection improvement.
    The two short range radars are integrated in the front bumper of the test vehicle. They are able to observe and track multiple targets in the region of interest. However, one difficulty is to distinguish between pedestrians and other objects. Therefore, a second sensor system is required to classify pedestrians reliably. This system consists of spatial distributed thermopile sensors which measure the object presence within their respective field-of-view independently. These measurements are then validated and fused using a mathematical framework. Thermopiles are excellent to detect the thermal radiation emitted by every human. However, a robust signal-interpretation algorithm is mandatory. In this work a statistical approach combining Dempster-Shafer theory with occupancy-grid method is used to achieve reliable pedestrian detection.
    Thermopile and radar sensors use independent signature-generation phenomena to develop information about the identity of objects within the field of view. They derive object signatures from different physical processes and generally do not cause a false alarm on the same artifacts. The integration of the sensor readings from the radar and thermopile system is conducted using a unifying sensor-level fusion architecture.

    Bio:
    Dirk Linzmeier received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ulm, Germany, in 2003 and is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree. He is working on a pedestrian detection system for automotive applications based on radar and thermopile sensors at the DaimlerChrysler research center in Ulm, Germany. His research interests include data fusion methods, object tracking, infrared detection systems and environmental sensing simulations. Mr. Linzmeier is also the author of several papers regarding pedestrian detection.

    CMU RI Thesis Oral: Assistive Intelligent Environments for Automatic Health Monitoring

    Daniel Wilson
    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

    As people grow older, they depend more heavily upon outside support for health assessment and medical care. The current healthcare infrastructure in America is widely considered to be inadequate to meet the needs of an increasingly older population. One solution, called aging in place, is to ensure that the elderly can live safely and independently in their own homes for as long as possible. Automatic health monitoring is a technological approach which helps people age in place by continuously providing key information to caregivers.

    In this thesis, we explore automatic health monitoring on several levels. First, we conduct a two-phased formative study to examine the work practices of professionals who currently perform in-home monitoring for elderly clients. With these findings in mind, we introduce the simultaneous tracking and activity recognition (STAR) problem, whose solution provides vital information for automatic in-home health monitoring. We describe and evaluate a particle filter approach that uses data from simple sensors commonly found in home security systems to provide room-level tracking and activity recognition. Next, we introduce the "context-aware recognition survey," a novel data collection method that helps users label anonymous episodes of activity for use as training examples in a supervised learner. Finally, we introduce the k-Edits Viterbi algorithm, which works within a Bayesian framework to automatically rate routine activities and detect irregular patterns of behavior.

    This thesis contributes to the field of automatic health monitoring through a combination of intensive background study, efficient approaches for location and activity inference, a novel unsupervised data collection technique, and a practical activity rating application.

    A copy of the thesis oral document can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dwilson/papers/thesis.pdf.

    Monday, September 19, 2005

    i-space seminar meeting time

    Hi Folks,

    Below is a messenage from Prof. Chu. Please tell me your available time. Thanks,

    -Bob

    Hi all,

    We probably want to set up a new time for i-space seminar. For this week, it would be great that you can ask your students about possible time slots for the seminar. Given the large number of students, we may be able to use lunch hours (Monday ~ Friday 12:30 ~ 2 pm) when classes are not scheduled.

    It would be great that you can let me know good meeting time at the end of this week.
    Thanks,

    Hao-hua Chu

    My talk this Wednesday

    sorry for the delay...

    I will be talking about the paper "Learning Activity-Based Ground Models from a Moving Helicopter Platform" and its related topics.

    Saturday, September 17, 2005

    CMU VASC Talk: Shedding Light on Scattering

    Srinivas Narasimhan
    CMU
    Monday, September 19, 2005

    Abstract: This is really two talks combined into one. The vision part will appear in ICCV'05 and the graphics part appeared in Siggraph'05.

    In the first half, I will explore the effects of active illumination in scattering media like underwater, atmosphere and fluids. Active illumination is often used by underwater vehicles and divers to explore and inspect underwater scenes, automotive manufacturers in designing headlights to see through fog and even microscopic imaging of biological tissues and organisms. In all these cases, the appearances of the scenes are corrupted due to scattering by the medium and hence, traditional structured light approaches fail completely. I will present physics based methods to make structured light techniques successful in scattering media. In addition, I will show surprising results that could not have been computed using traditional methods even in clear air (depth from photometric stereo, reconstructing mirrors and seeing through milk).

    In the second half, I will show how to render scattering effects in real-time, considering even more complex near-field lighting from point sources. The core result here is that the expensive integral of a 5D scattering function that needs to be computed for every viewing and surface illumination direction is factored into a product of an analytic function and a lookup of a 2D pre-computed function. This allows us to use standard textures and graphics hardware to render realistic effects at around 20-30fps. The algorithm is very simple to implement, can be used extensively in games for which third-party developers have already created Maya plugins of our algorithms.

    Wednesday, September 14, 2005

    The New York Times: Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins


    Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins
    By JOHN MARKOFF
    Published: September 14, 2005

    FLORENCE, Ariz. - Cresting a hill on a gravel road at a brisk 20 miles an hour, a driverless, computer-controlled Volkswagen Touareg plunges smartly into a swale. When its laser guidance system spots an overhanging limb, it lurches violently left and right before abruptly swerving off the road.

    More...

    CMU Thesis Proposal: Geometrically Coherent Image Interpretation

    Derek Hoiem
    Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

    Abstract: Objects in the world interact and are constrained according to their 3D geometry. Thus, inference of 3D geometry provides a natural interface for relating objects and performing actions such as navigation. We propose a simple class-based representation for 3D geometric information, in which we estimate 3D orientations from a single image using appearance-based models. With knowledge the scene's geometry, we can improve image understanding algorithms, including object detection, material labeling, and scene recognition. We focus on improving object detection using our geometric context and estimates of the camera parameters. Rather than simply using estimated geometry as features into a subsequent classification system, however, we propose to determine a coherent hypothesis that enforces the strong geometric relationships among the individual object and surface hypotheses. We develop a probabilistic formulation for encoding the relations of different types of scene information and describe inference algorithms for posing queries about the scene.

    Further Details: A copy of the thesis proposal document can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dhoiem/hoiemproposal.pdf.

    Tuesday, September 13, 2005

    Group meeting presentation schedule

    week 1. Any
    week 2. Jim
    week 3. Nelson
    week 4. Bright
    week 5. Eric
    week 6. ChiHao
    week 7. Vincent
    then repeat.

    Please post your talk title and the related links or pdf files 3 days before the talk.

    CNN video: Robot rescuers

    CNN's Daniel Sieberg looks at robots used to check for survivors in hurricane-ravaged areas. (September 12). Click here.

    Monday, September 12, 2005

    Group meeting

    Hi Folks,

    Come to our group meeting this Wednesday.

    Venue: CSIE 524
    Date : Wednesday, September 14
    Time : 11:00 AM

    Any, could you please post the title of your talk and related materials? People can read those papers/books in advance.

    Thanks,

    -Bob

    MIT thesis defense: Learning Task-Specific Similarity

    Speaker: Greg Shakhnarovich , CSAIL
    Date: Tuesday, September 13 2005

    The right measure of similarity between examples is important in many areas of computer science, and especially so in example-based learning. Similarity is commonly defined in terms of a conventional distance function, but such a definition does not necessarily capture the inherent meaning of similarity, which tends to depend on the underlying task. We develop an algorithmic approach to learning similarity from examples of what objects are deemed similar according to the task-specific notion of similarity at hand, as well as optional negative examples. Our learning algorithm constructs, in a greedy fashion, an encoding of the data. This encoding can be seen as an embedding into a space where a weighted Hamming distance is correlated with the unknown similarity. This allows us to predict when two previously unseen examples are similar and, importantly, to efficiently search a very large database for examples similar to a query.

    This approach is tested on a set of standard machine learning benchmark problems. The model of similarity learned with our algorithm provides an improvement over standard example-based classification and regression. We also apply this framework to problems in computer vision: articulated pose estimation of humans from single images, articulated tracking in video, and matching image regions subject to generic visual similarity.

    I have some questions

    I want to ask Bob some questions, but it seems relevent to all of us, so I'm posting here.
    1. What jobs can we do in this field?
        be a professor? work in a company? start a business?
        Also, let's say our group developed a technology for self-driving cars, and we want to start an automatic taxi service. Should we start a business or what?
    2. Innovation vs. Integration
        There are lots of good technologies(papers) that could be, but are not made into profitable/beneficial products/services, so why aren't they? It seems that researchers keep inventing new stuffs, but they are not becoming products. Someone can make lots of (undeserved?) money just by reading their papers and integrating them into products.
    3. Racism in America?
        I want to live in America (because of more space, cleaner air, more places to explore / things to do / job possibilities, better food, ...), but my dad says there'll be racism problems, especially for my kids. But I guess that if we are smarter or be better persons, people will treat us well enough. Besides, I think people are nicer there (according to movies and my personal experience).

    Sunday, September 11, 2005

    a good Conference, Robotics: Science and Systems

    Online Proceedings are available here.

    Projector-Camera Systems

    http://www.procams.org/
    Eric, check out the papers of Procams 2005.

    -Bob

    Saturday, September 10, 2005

    How to download papers

    These are the methods I know:

    1. CiteSeer (has many computer-science papers, for free)
        http://citeseer.csail.mit.edu/cs

    2. Google Scholar (google's index of online papers, most of them not free)
        http://scholar.google.com/

    3. 台大圖書館's 電子資料庫 (has IEEE subscription, and more)
        http://dbi.lib.ntu.edu.tw/libraryList/
        如何使用

    i-space summer retreat program.

    Hi Folks,

    You should attend this i-space summer retreat on Sep 15 &16. I will not attend the first day's program because I will attend 於9月15日上午舉行之『94學年度新進教師說明會』.

    -Bob


    Location CSIE 104
    ====================
    9/15 Thursday

    10:00 - 11:30 Activity overview from each lab (120 minutes)

    Welcome note ... Hao Chu (5 minute)
    Robot Lab overview ... Prof. Fu (10 minutes)
    Vision lab overview ... Prof. Hung (10 minutes)
    Agents lab overview ... Prof. Hsu (10 minutes)
    Embedded Computing lab overview ... Prof. Yang (10 minutes)
    Network lab overview ... Prof. Huang (10 minutes)
    Ubicomp lab overview ... Prof. Chu (5 minutes)
    Prof. KJ Lin talk (30 minutes)

    12:00 - 13:00 Lunch

    13:00 - 14:50 Session I: Localization (110 minutes)
    (r1) "Inhabitant Tracking via Floor Load Sensors", Wen-Hau Liau, Robot lab (20 minutes)
    (r2) "Real-Time Fine-Grained Multiple-Target Tracking on A Virtual Fab Architecture Based on Multi-Agents", Ching-Hu Lu, Robot lab (20 minutes)
    (n1) "Energy Efficient Personal Asset Tracking", Hao, Network lab (20 minutes)
    (u1) "Geta++: walking away with localization", Shun-yuan Yeh, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)
    (u3) "Adaptive WiFi localization: improving positioning accuracy under environmental dynamics", Yi-Chao Chen, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)
    (v1) "Improve WiFi Localization Accuracy Using Neighboring Information", Li-Wei Chan, Vision lab (20 minutes)

    14:50 - 15:05 Tea break

    15:05 - 16:45 Session II: System & Network (100 minutes)
    (e1) "Parallel Processing on Multicore Processors for Multimedia Applications", Lin-Chieh Shangkuan, Embedded lab (20 minutes)
    (e2) "Thermal Issues on Multicore Processors", Chung-Hsiang Lin, Embedded lab (20 minutes)
    (n2) "BL-live", SY, Network lab, (20 minutes)
    (n3) "Hotstreaming", Jerry, Network lab, (20 minutes)
    (n4) "Skyqe", Cheng-Ying, Network lab (20 minutes)


    ==============
    9/16 Friday

    10:00 ~ 10:30 Robotics for Safe Driving, Prof. Wang (30 minutes)

    10:30 ~ 12:00 Session III Context Awareness (90 minutes)
    (a1) "iCare activity recognition", wintel & Brooky, Agents lab (15 minutes)
    (a2) "A context-aware multi-agent system in emergency room", Skyish, Jih, 世偉, Agents lab (15 minutes)
    (u2) "Dietary-aware dining table: tracking what and how much you eat", Toung & 婕妤, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)
    (u4) "Privacy camera", Edwin Teng, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)
    (u5) "The watchful watch & ring", Shin-jan Wu, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)
    (u6) "The recipe-writing kitchen", Ben Tian, Ubicomp lab (15 minutes)

    12:00 ~ 13:00 Lunch

    13:00 ~ 13:45 Session IV: Interaction & Agents (45 minutes)

    (a3) "Active meeting, chihyuan & 昭瑋, Agents lab (15 minutes)
    (a4) "Agent-based photo sharing system", (Dan, left, 郁欣), Agents lab (15 minutes)
    (a5) "Virtual pets", (宣, 哲, salt), Agents lab (15 minutes)

    13:45 ~ 14:00 Tea break

    14:00 ~ 15:25 Session V: Vision (85 minutes)
    (r3) "Self-Calibrating Vision-Based Driver Assistance System Incorporating Particle Filter under Various Lighting Conditions", Yi-Ming Chan, Robot lab (20 minutes)
    (r4) "Region-Level Motion-Based Foreground Detection Using MRFs", Shih-Shinh Huang, Robot lab (20 minutes)
    (v2) "Steerable Projector-Camera System for Interactive Multi-Resolution Display", 葉韋賢, Vision lab (15 minutes)
    (v3) "Interactive Multi-Resolution Table", 賈義偉, Vision lab (15 minutes)
    (v4) TBD, 張譽馨, Vision lab (15 minutes)

    CNN: Backpack generates power from walking


    Friday, September 9, 2005; Posted: 10:06 a.m. EDT (14:06 GMT)

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A backpack that converts a plodding gait into electricity could soon be charging up mobile phones, navigation devices and even portable disc players, U.S.-based researchers said on Thursday.

    More...

    Wednesday, September 07, 2005

    NSC articles

    衛星導航智慧車
    作者: 王立昇 臺灣大學應用力學研究所
    The html version. The PDF version.

    電子貼身護士
    作者:
    游世安 臺灣大學電子工程學研究所
    呂學士 臺灣大學電機工程學系
    林啟萬 臺灣大學醫學工程學研究所
    王堯弘 臺大醫院影像醫學部

    Sunday, September 04, 2005

    CMU Talk: Estimating Geometric Scene Context from a Single Image

    Speaker: Alexei A. Efros

    Humans have an amazing ability to instantly grasp the overall 3D structure of a scene -- ground orientation, relative positions of major landmarks, etc -- even from a single image. This ability is completely missing in most popular recognition algorithms, which pretend that the world is flat and/or view it through a patch-sized peephole. Yet it seems very likely that having a grasp of this "geometric context" of a scene should be of great assistance for many tasks, including recognition, navigation, and novel view synthesis.

    In this talk, I will describe our first steps toward the goal of estimating a 3D scene context from a single image. We propose to estimate the coarse geometric properties of a scene by learning appearance-based models of \emph{geometric} classes. Geometric classes describe the 3D orientation of an image region with respect to the camera. We provide a multiple-hypothesis segmentation framework for robustly estimating scene structure from a single image and obtaining confidences for each geometric label. These confidences can then (hopefully) be used to improve the performance of many other applications. We provide a quantitative evaluation of our algorithm on a dataset of challenging outdoor images.

    We also demonstrate its usefulness in two applications: 1) improving object detection (preliminary results), and 2) automatic qualitative single-view reconstruction ("Automatic Photo Pop-up", SIGGRAPH'05).

    Joint work with Derek Hoiem and Martial Hebert at CMU.

    Saturday, September 03, 2005

    Group meeting

    Hi Folks,

    Let's have our first group meeting this Wednesday, 11AM at Room 524. Please DO let me know if you can not attend it.

    Thanks,

    -Bob