Intel Seminar : Unsupervised Analysis of Human Activities in Everyday Environments

Title: Structure from Statistics: Unsupervised Analysis of HumanActivities in Everyday Environments
Speaker:Raffay Hamid
Monday, April 21st, 2008, 10:30am- 12:00pm

Abstract:
In order to make computers proactive and assistive, we must enablethem to perceive, learn, and predict what is happening in theirsurroundings. This presents us with the challenge of formalizingcomputational models of everyday human activities. These models mustperform well in the face of data uncertainty and complex activitydynamics. Traditional approaches to this end assume prior knowledgeabout the structure of human activities, using which explicitlydefined activity-models are learned in a supervised manner. However,for a majority of everyday environments such activity structure isgenerally not known a priori. In this talk, I will discuss knowledgerepresentations and manipulation techniques that facilitate minimallysupervised learning of activity structure. In particular, I willpresent n-grams and Suffix Tree based sequence representations forhuman activity analysis. I will discuss how such data-driven approachtowards activity modeling can help discover and characterize humanactivities, and learn typical behaviors crucial for detectingirregular occurrences in an environment. I will provide experimentalvalidation of my proposed approach for activity analysis inenvironments such as a residential house, a loading dock area, and ahousehold kitchen.

Bio:
Raffay Hamid is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the School ofInteractive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where heis a member of the Computational Perception Lab., and the Aware HomeResearch Initiative. His research interests lie at the intersection ofStatistical Learning, Computer Vision and Ubiquitous Computing.
During his graduate years, Raffay has worked as a Research Intern atIntel Research Lab., Mitsubishi Electronic Research Lab., andMicrosoft Research. From 2001 to 2002, he was a Signal ProcessingEngineer at Techlogix Inc., working on a joint project with GeneralMotors and Eaton Corporation. During this time he also served as anadjunct lecturer at the University of Engineering and TechnologyLahore, Pakistan. He has been awarded the National Merit Scholarshipfrom the Government of Pakistan from 1994 to 2001. More informationabout his curricular and co-curricular interests can be found at:www.cc.gatech.edu/~raffay .