Events Calendar

MHI Distinguished Visitor Talk

Speaker: Prof. Petros Maragos, School of E.C.E., National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Talk Title: Action and Gesture Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract: In this talk we will present some advances from our research in the EU project MOBOT which generally aims at the development of an intelligent active mobility assistance robot. We will focus on one of its main goals: to provide multimodal sensory processing capabilities for human action recognition. Specifically, a reliable multimodal information processing and action recognition system needs to be developed, that will detect, analyze and recognize the human user actions based on the captured multimodal sensory signals and with a reasonable level of accuracy and detail for intelligent assistive robotics. One of the main thrusts in the above effort is the development of robust and effective computer vision techniques to achieve the visual processing goals based on multiple cues such as spatiotemporal RGB appearance data as well as depth data from Kinect sensors. Another major challenge is the integration of recognizing specific verbal and gestural commands in the considered human-robot interaction context. In this presentation we summarize advancements in three tasks of the above multimodal processing system for human-robot interaction (HRI): action recognition, gesture recognition and spoken command recognition. More information, related papers and current results can be found in http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr and http://robotics.ntua.gr.

Biography: Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1998, he has been working as a professor at the NTUA School of ECE. He has held a visiting scientist position at MIT LIDS in fall 2012. He is currently the Director of the NTUA Division of Signals, Control and Robotics, and the Director of the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Lab. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, pattern recognition, image processing and computer vision, audio and speech/language processing, cognitive systems, and robotics. In the above areas he has published numerous papers, book chapters, and has also co-edited three Springer research books, one on multimodal processing and interaction and two on shape analysis. He has served as: Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops, including VCIP 1992 (GC), ISMM 1996 (GC), VLBV 2001 (GC), MMSP 2007 (GC), ECCV 2010 (PC), ECCV 2010 Workshop on Sign, Gesture and Activity, EUSIPCO 2012 (TC), 2011 & 2014 Dagstuhl Symposia on Shape, 2015 IROS Workshop on Cognitive Mobility Assistance Robots; member of the IEEE committees on DSP, IMDSP and MMSP. He is currently organizing EUSIPCO 2017 (GC).

His is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards for his academic work, including a 1983 Sigma Xi best thesis award, a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award, a 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award, the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award, the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award, the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and a Fellow of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions.

Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, Theodora Chaspari, and Zisis Skordilis

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems