LCSR Seminar: Robert Pless “Supporting Sex Trafficking Investigations with Deep Metric Learning”

When:
January 29, 2020 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
2020-01-29T12:00:00-05:00
2020-01-29T13:00:00-05:00
Where:
Hackerman B-17
Contact:
LCSR
410-516-6841

Abstract:

This talk shares work to develop traffickCam, a system to support sex trafficking investigations by recognizing the hotel rooms in pictures of trafficking victims.  I’ll share context for this project and ways that this system is currently being used at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as special challenges that come from this problem domain such as dramatic differences in rooms within a hotel and the similarity of rooms across chains.  Attacking these problems led us to specific improvements in large scale classification with Deep Metric Learning, including novel training algorithms, visual explainability and new visualization approaches to compare and understand the representations they learn.

Bio:

Robert Pless is the Patrick and Donna Martin Professor and Chair of Computer Science at George Washington University.  Dr. Pless was born at Johns Hopkins hospital in 1972, has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1994 and a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000.  He was on the faculty of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis from 2000-2017. His research focuses on geometrical and statistical Computer Vision.

 

 This talk will be recorded. Click Here for all of the recorded seminars for the 2019-2020 academic year.