Calendar
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.
Abstract:
AI is moving both faster and slower than the general public realizes — it is being deployed extensively across many domains, but we are also still very, very far away from the sorts of autonomous robots imagined by Asimov or anyone who watched the Jetsons as a child or watches Westworld today. Overlapping sets of ethical issues are raised by both current stages and domains of AI development and use and by the autonomy and uses we imagine and hope AI will have in the future. What is crucial is that we appreciate and attend to these issues today, so that we can maximize the benefits of this technology for humanity while minimizing the harms.
Bio:
Debra JH Mathews, PhD, MA, is the Assistant Director for Science Programs for the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Mathews earned her PhD in genetics from Case Western Reserve University. Concurrent with her PhD, she earned a Master’s degree in bioethics, also from Case. She completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in genetics at Johns Hopkins, and the Greenwall Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. Dr. Mathews has also spent time at the Genetics and Public Policy Center, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, working in various capacities on science policy. Dr. Mathews’s academic work focuses on ethics and policy issues raised by emerging biotechnologies, with particular focus on genetics, stem cell science, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.
Abstract:
Understanding human activity is a very challenging task, but a prerequisite for the autonomy of robots interacting with humans. Solutions that generalize must involve not only perception but also cognition and a grounding in the motor system. Our approach is to describe complex actions as events at multiple time scales. At the lowest level, signals are chunked into primitive symbolic events, and these are then combined into increasingly more complex events of longer and longer time spans. The approach will be demonstrated on our work of creating visually learning robots, and the talk will describe some of its novel components: an architecture that has cognitive and linguistic processes communicate with the vision and motor systems in a dialog fashion; vision processes that parse the objects and movements based on their attributes, spatial relations, and 3D geometry; the combination of tactile sensing with vision for better recognition; and approaches to cover long-term relations in observed activities.
Bio:
Cornelia Fermüller is a research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland at College Park. She holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria and an M.S. from the University of Technology, Graz, Austria, both in Applied Mathematics. She co-founded the Autonomy Cognition and Robotics (ARC) Lab and co-leads the Perception and Robotics Group at UMD. Her research is in the areas of Computer Vision, Human Vision, and Robotics. She studies and develops biologically inspired Computer Vision solutions for systems that interact with their environment. In recent years, her work has focused on the interpretation of human activities, and on motion processing for fast active robots (such as drones) using as input bio-inspired event-based sensors.
http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/users/fer
The Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics will highlight its elite robotics students and showcase cutting-edge research projects in areas that include Medical Robotics, Extreme Environments Robotics, Human-Machine Systems for Manufacturing, BioRobotics and more. JHU Robotics Industry Day will take place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Levering Hall on the Homewood Campus at Johns Hopkins University.
Robotics Industry Day will provide top companies and organizations in the private and public sectors with access to the LCSR’s forward-thinking, solution-driven students. The event will also serve as an informal opportunity to explore university-industry partnerships.
You will experience dynamic presentations and discussions, observe live demonstrations, and participate in speed networking sessions that afford you the opportunity to meet Johns Hopkins most talented robotics students before they graduate.
Please contact Ashley Moriarty if you have any questions. You can register HERE.
Please contact Ashley Moriarty if you have any questions.
