We are going to do a series of seminars covering these topics:

• Bayesian Estimation
• Kernel/SVM
• Cognitive methods
• Natural images methods
• Inference (logical, statistical, cognitive)
• First-Ordel Logic & Probability
• Flexible Planning

Please fill in doodle poll your membership.

Seminar Friday 23 July 2010 - Stefano Soatto - 16:00 Aula A6 DIS

Title: Data to Information To Cognition: The Lesson from Shannon to Gibson, and the first steps towards a theory of visual information

Speaker: Stefano Soatto, UCLA

Abstract: I will discuss a notion of visual information as complexity not of the raw data, but of the images after the effects of nuisance factors such as viewpoint and illumination are discounted. It is rooted in ideas of J. J. Gibson, and stands in contrast to traditional information as entropy or coding length of the data regardless of its use, and regardless of the nuisance factors affecting it. Its computation is made possible by a recent characterization of the set of images modulo viewpoint and contrast changes, that induce group (invertible) transformations on the domain and range of the image. The non-invertibility of nuisances such as occlusion and quantization induces an "information gap" that can only be bridged by controlling the data acquisition process. Measuring visual information entails early vision operations, tailored to the structure of the nuisances so as to be "lossless" with respect to visual decision and control tasks (as opposed to data transmission and storage tasks implicit in traditional information theory). I illustrate these ideas on visual exploration, whereby a "Shannonian Explorer" navigates unaware of the structure of the physical space surrounding it, while a "Gibsonian Explorer" is guided by the topology of the environment, despite measuring only images of it, without performing 3D reconstruction. This operational definition of visual information suggests desirable properties that a visual representation should possess to best accomplish vision-based decision and control tasks.

Seminar Friday 30 July 2010 - Jim Little -  11:00 Aula A6 DIS

Title: Actively Using Vision and Context for Home Robotics

Speaker: Jim Little, University of British Columbia

Abstract: Increasingly we want computers and robots to observe us and know who we are and what we are doing, and to understand the objects and tasks in our world, both at work and in the home. I will describe how we've built systems for mobile robots to find objects using visual cues and learn about shared workspaces. Further I will review how a range of visual capabilities permits the robot to work for and with humans.
We've demonstrated these abilities on Curious George, our visually-guided mobile robot that has competed and won the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge at AAAI (2007), CVPR (2008) and ISVC (2009), in a completely autonomous visual search task. In the SRVC visual classifiers are learned from images gleaned from the Web. Challenges include poor image quality, badly labeled data and confusing semantics (e.g., synonyms). Clustering of training data, image quality analysis, and viewpoint-guided visual attention enable effective object search by a home robot.

Seminar 15 December 2010 - Matei Mancas . 12:00 Aula Magna DIS

Title: Overview of the research at the IT department of the University of Mons, Belgium

Speaker: Matei Mancas, University of Mons

The talk will begin with a brief introduction to the university in the French-speaking Belgian community. Then, some classical research within the IT department will be described:

• speech recognition.
• speech synthesis.
• image processing.

In the second part, some new trends in the research of the IT department are addressed:

• audio expressivity.
• multimedia retrieval.
• computational attention.

Finally, the NumediaArt research project, which deals with digital arts putting together a lot of the department research, is presented.