CSL Social Hour

Considering the great interest and enthusiasm that we observe these days both in research and real life regarding machine learning, CSL social hour committee is glad to have Prof. Matus Telgarsky from department of computer science this Friday, Dec. 1 at 3:00PM in 369CSL. In this week’s social hour Prof. Telgarsky will talk about “Open Problems and Recent Advances in Neural Network Theory”.

Bio: Matus Telgarsky obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UCSD in 2013 under Sanjoy Dasgupta; while there, his research focused primarily upon optimization and statistical aspects of unconstrained and unregularized algorithms (e.g., boosting), and to a lesser extent, clustering. He then served as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan, as well as a consulting researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City. Since fall 2016, he has been an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; his most recent interests are representation and nonconvex optimization.

We are glad to have Prof. Seth Hutchinson, as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, Nov 10 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. In this session Prof. Hutchinson will talk about “What’s next for Robotics?”.

Bio: Prof. Hutchinson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. In 1990, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He served as associate department head of ECE from 2001 to 2007. Prof. Hutchinson currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, and chairs the steering committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Conference Editorial Board (2006-2008), and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2008-2013). He has published more than 200 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision, and is coauthor of the books Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations, published by MIT Press, and Robot Modeling and Control, published by Wiley.

We are very pleased to have Ryan Corey as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, Nov 3 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. In this week’s social hour Ryan will talk about “Multichannel Signal Processing for Augmented Listening Devices”.

Abstract: Augmented listening devices, such as hearing aids, personal sound amplifiers, and an emerging category of “smart” headphones, promise to enhance human listening by processing the sound we hear to reduce noise and improve understanding, but most products available today perform poorly in very noisy environments. In our research, we show how advanced listening devices can use microphone arrays to separate, process, and enhance multiple sound sources even in challenging listening environments.

Bio: Ryan Corey is a PhD student working with Professor Andrew Singer in CSL. A Chicago-area native, Ryan completed his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, then returned to Illinois for graduate school. In 2014, he was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Ryan studies speech and audio signal processing with a particular focus on multichannel processing for hearing aid applications. When he’s not playing with microphones, Ryan enjoys travel, cooking, and silly hats.

We are glad to have Xiang-Shen Ye, as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 27 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Optimization in Curbing Risk Contagion among Financial Institutes”.

Abstract: Financial institutions are interconnected by holding debt claims against each other. It can be shown that a good mechanism of default liquidation may improve the total wealth of the financial system. this problem can be formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem with constraints and propose an optimal liquidation policy to minimize the system’s loss. It can be shown that this problem resembles a Markov decision problem (MDP) and therefore we can apply the direct-comparison based optimization approach to solve this problem.

Bio: Xiang-Shen is a visiting Ph.D. student at Coordinated Science Laboratory working under the supervision of Professor Tamer Başar. Currently he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, under the supervision of Professor Xi-Ren Cao. He received the B.Eng. degree in automation science from Beijing University of Aeronautic and Astronautics, Beijing, China, in 2013. His current research interests include discrete event dynamic systems, stochastic learning and optimization, and financial engineering. In his free time, he enjoys reading, hiking, skiing, and playing basketball.

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, Oct 26. The link to upload your videos is: go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s social hour by Hamidreza Jafarnejadsani. In this week’s social hour Hamidreza will talk about his research on “Adaptive Sampled-Data Control Design for MIMO Systems with Application to Cyber-Physical Security“. The event will be held on Friday, October 20 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Hamidreza Jafarnejadsani is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at UIUC. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees, both in Mechanical Engineering, from the University of Tehran in 2011 and the University of Calgary in 2013, respectively. He is working under the supervision of professor Naira Hovakimyan on developing secure detection and control algorithms for cyber-physical control systems, by extending the L1 adaptive control theory to sampled-data and multirate control frameworks, and leveraging the advances in fault-tolerant software architectures. He uses UAV platforms to demonstrate the security challenges and validate the theoretical solutions.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s social hour by Prof. Alexander Schwing. In this week’s social hour Prof. Schwing will talk about “Deep learning and artificial intelligence — what’s next?“. The event will be held on Friday, Sept 29 at 3:10PM in CSL 369.

Abstract: Progress in the area of deep learning and artificial intelligence has resulted in impressive results for a variety of applications from image categorization to playing the game of go and dermatologist-level cancer classification to name a few. In this social hour we will discuss what’s next?

Bio: Alex Schwing is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on computer vision and machine learning topics. He received is B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016. His research interests are in the area of computer vision and machine learning, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal.

 

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, Sept 28. The link to upload your videos is: go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s social hour by CSL Prof. Ivan Dokmanić. In this week’s social hour Prof. Dokmanić will talk about his experience as a faculty in CSL, his research team and projects they are working on. The event will be held on Friday, September 22 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Assistant Professor Ivan Dokmanić (PhD ’15) received a doctorate in computer and communication science from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Previously he was a teaching assistant at the University of Zagreb, a codec developer for MainConcept AG, and a digital audio effects designer for Little Endian Ltd. During summer 2013, he was with Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington where he worked on ultrasonic depth sensings.

As a postdoctoral researcher with Laurent Daudet (Institut Langevin, Paris) and Stéphane Mallat (ENS, Paris), he used echoes to help robots navigate in unknown rooms and developed new ways to regularize inverse problems in computational imaging.

He works on a medley of audio and acoustics, distance geometry, and inverse problems theory. For his work on room shape reconstruction using sound, he received the Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP 2011; in 2014 he received a Google PhD Fellowship. He is a laureate of the EPFL Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. One of his ongoing projects on the use of echoes in auditory scene analysis (“Echonomy in Auditory Scene Analysis”) is funded by a Google Faculty Research Award.

He used to be the singer and the lead guitarist of Ivan and the Terribles, featuring Martin Vetterli on bass, Paolo Prandoni on everything, and Marta Martinez-Cámara on saxophone.

Do you want to know where you can safely store all your research data, or have you ever wondered what you should do when your Matlab license doesn’t work. We are pleased to have Mark Hart as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, Sept 15 at 3:00PM in 301 CSL. Mark will tell us about wide variety of services provided by Engineering IT, to help both graduate student as well as faculty have better research experience.

Bio: Mark Hart has been an IT Professional at Illinois since 2004. In his career, he has worked in areas ranging from healthcare to network security, and this has led him to his current role as Research Technology Facilitator (RTF) for Engineering IT Shared Services. As RTF, Mark serves as an advocate for faculty and researchers, connecting them to the resources they need and helping ensure those researchers have a voice in shaping the services they use. In his role as RTF, Mark has been working with Klara Nahrstedt’s 4CeeD project team, as well as collaborating with NCSA on research computation services. Mark is currently pursuing a masters degree in Information Science with an emphasis on data curation and information management.

We are glad to have Suryanarayana Sankagiri as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, Sept 8 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. Surya will talk about “Community Detection: A Fresh Perspective“.
Abstract: Community detection is the problem of finding dense subgraphs within a large graph. It arises in the analysis of many different types of networks, be it social networks or citation networks. My research involves the development of a new model for generating graphs with communities, and finding algorithms that work well for this model. The exciting part about this research is that it essentially involves concepts learned in courses like ECE 534

Bio: Surya is a 2nd year graduate student in the ECE department, working with Prof. Bruce Hajek. He is currently working on community detection, a form of unsupervised learning. Apart from communications theory (currently being pursued as theoretical machine learning), he is also interested control theory. He did his undergrad in IIT Bombay, India. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, playing badminton and tennis, and cycling around Champaign.