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Events for December 02, 2008

  • Non-Parametric Latent Variable Models for Shape and Motion Analysis

    Tue, Dec 02, 2008 @ 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Raquel Urtasun, MIT
    Host: Prof. Fei Sha, Prof. Ram NevatiaAbstract:
    Dimensionality reduction is a popular approach to dealing with high dimensional data sets. It is often the case that linear dimensionality reduction, such as principal component analysis (PCA), does not adequately capture the structure of the data. In this talk I will discuss Probabilistic Non-linear Latent Variable models in the context of 3D human body tracking, 3D shape recovery from single images, character animation and classification.First, I will describe how to use Gaussian Process Latent Variable models (GPLVMs) for learning human pose and motion priors for 3D human body tracking from monocular images. I will then show how to combine multiple local models to model the space of possible deformations of objects of arbitrary shapes, but made of the same material. This will allow us to perform monocular 3D shape recovery in the presence of complex deformations of poorly textured objects.In dimensionality reduction approaches, the data is typically embedded in a Euclidean latent space. However for some data sets, such as human motion, this is inappropriate. We present a range of approaches for embedding data into non-Euclidean latent spaces that incorporate prior knowledge. This allows us to learn models suitable for motion generation with good generalization properties. Finally, I.ll show how to extend these models to be discriminative, resulting in accurate classification even when dealing with high dimensional input spaces and very small training sets.Biography:
    Raquel Urtasun is currently a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, working with Prof. Trevor Darrell and will be a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley EECS. Raquel’s main research areas are computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics. During 2006-2008, she was a postdoctoral associate at MIT-CSAIL. She earned her PhD at EPFL (Switzerland) in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Fua on Motion Models for Robust 3D Human Body Tracking.

    Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: CS Colloquia

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  • Electronic Arts Information Session

    Tue, Dec 02, 2008 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Join representatives of this company as they share general company information and available opportunities.

    Location: Grace Ford Salvatori (GFS) 106

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services

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  • Q & A with Mr. Ronald Wensel

    Tue, Dec 02, 2008 @ 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    University Calendar


    Q & A with Mr. Ronald Wensel. Director of Financial Management, Adventist HealthThe Student Health Council is hosting Ron Wensel to answer questions and provide advice from his years of experience in health care contracting.Ron is Director of Financial Management for Adventist Health, a 20-hospital system with hospitals located in California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii.His Financial Management responsibilities include managing financial turnaround/improvement programs at hospitals, directing the managed care financial decision support function and coordinating corporate activities related to cost accounting and expected reimbursement. Prior to Ron's Adventist Health Corporate position, Ron implemented a hospital executive decision support system at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. This included developing the systems, processes and knowledge to apply proven management accounting techniques to improve the financial and operating performance of the hospital.Ron has a Bachelor and Masters degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in Industrial and Systems Engineering. He started his career as a management consultant with Ernst & Young, then was a product manager of a healthcare software system and a manager in a large teaching hospital before joining Adventist Health. Throughout his career, his responsibilities and efforts have been focus on working with people to develop effective management processes in areas such as managed care operations, managed care contract negotiations, cost effective clinical practice, operations, labor productivity, cost accounting and budgets.Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 7pm, RGL 308If you would like to attend the event, please send an RSVP to mhashc@usc.edu

    Location: Ralph And Goldy Lewis Hall (RGL) - 308

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Georgia Lum

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