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Events for April 09, 2015
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PhD Defense - Tung Sing Leung
Thu, Apr 09, 2015 @ 09:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Date: Thursday April 9th, 9.30am
Location: SAL 213
Title: Outdoor Visual Navigation Aid For The Blind In Dynamic Environments
PhD Candidate: Tung-Sing Leung
Committee:
Prof. Gerard G Medioni (Chair)
Prof. Laurent Itti
Prof. James D. Weiland (outside member)
Abstract:
This thesis proposes a visual navigation aid for the blind. Our goal is to develop a wearable system to help the visually impaired navigate in highly dynamic outdoor environments. The proposed solution uses both visual sensing and existing map available online. Our work focus on two parts : visual odometry (VO) and localization. We propose different methods to compute the visual odometry even in clutter environments using either wearable stereo camera or smartphone. For the case of stereo camera, instead of computing egomotion from 3D point correspondences in consecutive frames, we propose to find the ground plane, then decompose the 6-DoF egomotion into a motion of the ground plane, and a planar motion on the ground plane. The ground plane is estimated at each frame either by analysis of the disparity array or approximated from the Inertial measurement unit (IMU) reading. We have extended our visual odometry to monocular system so that the proposed framework is applicable to smartphone which is more accessible than the stereo camera. To further improve the accuracy of the visual odometry and correct the drift caused by dead reckoning during long navigation, we combine visual odometry with the semantic information available in map to estimate the global coordinates of the walking user. The motion estimation results are fed into a Monte Carlo Localization framework which localizes the user by matching the local motion trajectory with the shape of the street network found in the map. We validated our system on real scenario of hours of walking around in both open terrain and urban environment. Experimental results show that our method not only corrects the cumulative drifting error but also manages to recover from temporary loss.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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CS Colloquium: Danai Koutra (Carnegie Mellon) - What’s in my data? Fast, principled algorithms for exploring large graphs
Thu, Apr 09, 2015 @ 09:45 AM - 10:50 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Danai Koutra, Carnegie Mellon
Talk Title: Whatâs in my data? Fast, principled algorithms for exploring large graphs
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Networks naturally capture a host of real-world interactions, spanning from friendships to brain activity. But, given a massive graph, such as the Facebook social network, what can be learned about its structure? Are there any changes over time? Where should people's attention be directed? In this talk I will present my work on scalable algorithms that help us to explore and make sense of large, networked data when we want to know âwhatâs in the dataâ. I will present how summarization and similarity analysis can help answer this question, and I will focus on two of my approaches âVoGâ and âDeltaConâ. VoG disentangles the complex graph connectivity patterns, and efficiently summarizes large graphs with important and semantically meaningful structures by leveraging information theoretic methods. DeltaCon is a well-founded, fast method that detects and explains changes in time-evolving or aligned networks by assessing their similarity. Both works are being used by industry, and give interesting discoveries in large real-world graphs.
The lecture will be available to stream HERE.
Biography: Danai Koutra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. She earned her M.S. from CMU in 2013 and her diploma in ECE at the National Technical University of Athens in 2010. She works on large-scale graph mining and devises algorithms and methods for exploring, understanding, and learning from graph data when the nature of the problem is not known in advance. She holds one "rate-1" patent, and has six (pending) patents on bipartite graph alignment. She also has many papers (including 2 award-winning papers) and tutorials in top data mining conferences. Her work has been covered by media outlets, such as the MIT Technology Review, and is being taught in courses at top universities, including the Tepper School of Business at CMU and Rutgers University.
Host: Computer Science Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Securing Cloud Databases
Thu, Apr 09, 2015 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ken Eguro, Embedded and Reconfigurable Computing Group, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Securing Cloud Databases
Abstract: Despite the trend toward cloud services, many applications, such as very basic databases, are not yet in the cloud due to security concerns. This talk discusses how encryption requirements make cloud migration difficult and how fundamentally different cloud architectures are needed to support applications that handle sensitive data. The key challenge is to facilitate computation on encrypted data in an efficient manner. This talk provides an overview of MSR efforts working toward solving this problem, requiring a holistic approach combining crypto algorithms, secure hardware, distributed computation, and systems engineering.
Biography: Ken joined the Embedded and Reconfigurable Computing group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington in 2008. He also holds an Affiliate Assistant Professor position in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Some of his past and present research interests include: applications of high-performance computing architectures, FPGA development and integration issues, and security concerns of hardware/security solutions using hardware. He is also an amateur enthusiast of cryptography & cryptanalysis.
Host: Viktor Prasanna
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kathy Kassar
