Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Hyun Soo Park (University of Pennsylvania) - Computational Social Cognition

Speaker: Hyun Soo Park, University of Pennsylvania

Talk Title: Computational Social Cognition

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Humans interact with one another by sending visible social signals such as facial expressions, body gestures, and gaze directions.

Computational understanding of these social signals is becoming more important for artificial agents such as service robots because they are increasingly integrated in our social space.

In this talk, I will present a computational framework for social cognition - the ability to perceive, model, and predict social signals.

The main challenges of developing computational social cognition are that 1) social signals are too subtle to be detected by current computer vision solutions and 2) they cannot be understood by analyzing an individual signal in isolation as they are reliant upon each other. I will argue that first person cameras, e.g., head-mounted cameras, are an ideal sensor placement to capture such subtlety and will show that the relationship between the signals can be modeled by leveraging a 3D reconstruction of human body motion. In the first part of my talk, I will focus on joint attention that encodes the relationship between gaze directions and present its predictive model to recognize social interactions. This predictive model is applied various tasks, e.g., event video editing, social anomaly recognition, and region of interest detection. In the second part, I will introduce a large scale motion capture system (510 cameras) to recover subtle social signals. This system reconstructs dense 3D trajectories of body gestures at unprecedented level of high spatial resolution (~20,000 trajectories per body). Then, I will demonstrate applications of computational social cognition in behavioral analysis, sport analytics, and robotics.

Biography: Hyun Soo Park is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania working with Prof. Jianbo Shi. He earned Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Yaser Sheikh. His research aims to develop a computational representation of social behaviors. He has over 15 publications in top tier conferences and journals that include computer vision (IJCV, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV), graphics (SIGGRAPH), machine learning (NIPS), and robotics (IJRR, ICRA, IROS). He organized Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (2014) in conjunction with ECCV 2014 and will give a tutorial on Group Behavioral Analysis and its Applications in conjunction with CVPR 2015 based on his Ph.D. thesis. His work has been covered by various major media including Discovery Channel, MSNBC, WIRED, NSF, and Slashdot. Prior to his Ph.D., he received his M.S. degree from Carnegie Mellon University and his B.S. degree from POSTECH.

Host: Hao Li

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair