Events & Talks

Perceiving Systems Talk Prof. David W. Jacobs 10-11-2015 Understanding Plants and Animals I will describe a series of work that aims to automatically understand images of animals and plants. I will begin by describing recent work that uses Bounded Distortion matching to model pose variation in animals. Using a generic 3D model of an animal and multiple images of different individuals in various poses, we construct a model that captures the way in which the animal articulates. This is done by solving for the pose of the template that matches each image while simultaneously solving for the stiffness of each tetrahedron of the model. We minimize an L1 norm on stiffness, produci... Stephan Streuber

Perceiving Systems Talk Olga Diamanti 28-10-2015 Design of Tangent Vector-Set Fields using Polynomials The design of tangent vector fields on discrete surfaces is a basic building block for many geometry processing applications, such as surface remeshing, parameterization and architectural geometric design. Many applications require the design of multiple vector fields (vector sets) coupled in a nontrivial way; for example, sets of more than two vectors are used for meshing of triangular, quadrilateral and hexagonal meshes. In this talk, a new, polynomial-based representation for general unordered vector sets will be presented. Using this representation we can efficiently interpolate user pr... Gerard Pons-Moll

IS Colloquium Jonas Richiardi 19-10-2015 Imaging genomics of functional brain networks Moritz Grosse-Wentrup Michel Besserve

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Jonas Richiardi 19-10-2015 Imaging genomics of functional brain networks During rest, brain activity is intrinsically synchronized between different brain regions, forming networks of coherent activity. These functional networks (FNs), consisting of multiple regions widely distributed across lobes and hemispheres, appear to be a fundamental theme of neural organization in mammalian brains. Despite hundreds of studies detailing this phenomenon, the genetic and molecular mechanisms supporting these functional networks remain undefined. Previous work has mostly focused on polymorphisms in candidate genes, or used a twin study approach to demonstrate heritability... Moritz Grosse-Wentrup Michel Besserve

Perceiving Systems Talk Max Welling 19-10-2015 Learning to generate The recent amazing success of deep learning has been mainly in discriminative learning, that is, classification and regression. An important factor for this success has been, besides Moore's law, the availability of large labeled datasets. However, it is not clear whether in the future the amount of available labels grows as fast as the amount of unlabeled data, providing one argument to be interested in unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. Besides this there are a number of other reasons why unsupervised learning is still important, such as the fact that data in the life sciences ... Peter Vincent Gehler

IS Colloquium Vladimir Vapnik 12-10-2015 Intelligent Learning Michel Besserve

Autonomous Motion Talk Yasemin Bekiroglu 12-10-2015 Shape and Stability Estimation based on Learning from Visual and Tactile Data Unknown information required to plan grasps such as object shape and pose needs to be extracted from the environment through sensors. However, sensory measurements are noisy and associated with a degree of uncertainty. Furthermore, object parameters relevant to grasp planning may not be accurately estimated, e.g., friction and mass. In real-world settings, these issues can lead to grasp failures with serious consequences. I will talk about learning approaches using real sensory data, e.g., visual and tactile, to assess grasp success (discriminative and generative) that can be used to trigge... Jeannette Bohg

Empirical Inference Talk Gael Varoquaux 09-10-2015 Using machine learning to understand cognition from brain images Moritz Grosse-Wentrup

Talk Robin Evans 29-09-2015 Causal Models and How to Refute Them Directed acyclic graph models (DAG models, also called Bayesian networks) are widely used in the context of causal inference, and they can be manipulated to represent the consequences of intervention in a causal system. However, DAGs cannot fully represent causal models with confounding; other classes of graphs, such as ancestral graphs and ADMGs, have been introduced to deal with this using additional kinds of edge, but we show that these are not sufficiently rich to capture the range of possible models. In fact, no mixed graph over the observed variables is rich enough, regardless of how ... Sabrina Rehbaum

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Sach Mukherjee 28-09-2015 High-dimensional statistical approaches for personalized medicine Human diseases show considerable heterogeneity at the molecular level. Such heterogeneity is central to personalized medicine efforts that seek to exploit molecular data to better understand disease biology and inform clinical decision making. An emerging notion is that diseases and disease subgroups may differ not only at the level of mean molecular abundance, but also with respect to patterns of molecular interplay. I will discuss our ongoing efforts to develop methods to investigate such heterogeneity, with an emphasis on some high-dimensional aspects. Michel Besserve Jonas Peters

Autonomous Motion Talk Anna Belardinelli 25-09-2015 Action in the eye of the beholder: anticipatory gaze strategies for manual object interaction Our eyes typically anticipate the next action module in a sequence, by targeting the relevant object for the following step. Yet, how the final goal, or the way we intend to achieve it, is reflected in the early visual exploration of each object has been less investigated. In a series of experiments we considered how scan paths on real-world objects would be affected by different factors such as task, object orientation, familiarity, or low-level saliency, hence revealing which components can account for fixation target selection during eye-hand coordination. In each experiment, the fixatio... Jeannette Bohg

Perceiving Systems Talk Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcalt 21-09-2015 "Artist" Talk Lilla and Bill are two returning artists to Perceiving Systems. Their talk will update us on the exciting projects that they’ve been involved with since their last visit and to present some of their current plans that will unfold during the week (Sept 21st - 25th). They will be joining our department and working with professional dancers in the 4D scanner as part of an art project on mental health. In general, Lilla and Bill have been using 3D captures as an artistic tool to visualize the human body in a contemporary form for some time. They produce marionettes or avatars which can be se... Emma-Jayne Holderness

Talk Utkan Demirci 18-09-2015 Micro- and nano-scale technologies for applications in medicine and biology

Talk Iain D. Couzin 11-09-2015 Collective Sensing and Decision-Making in Animal Groups: From Fish Schools to Primate Societies Jane Walters

Perceiving Systems Talk Irfan Essa 10-09-2015 Data-Driven Methods for Video Analysis and Enhancement In this talk, I will start with describing the pervasiveness of image and video content, and how such content is growing with the ubiquity of cameras. I will use this to motivate the need for better tools for analysis and enhancement of video content. I will start with some of our earlier work on temporal modeling of video, then lead up to some of our current work and describe two main projects. (1) Our approach for a video stabilizer, currently implemented and running on YouTube, and its extensions. (2) A robust and scaleable method for video segmentation. I will describe, in some deta... Naejin Kong

Perceiving Systems Talk Sergi Rocamora 08-09-2015 Bayesian Image-Based Rendering and Application to Stereoscopic Cinema and 3DTV Optics with long focal length have been extensively used for shooting 2D cinema and television, either to virtually get closer to the scene or to produce an aesthetical effect through the deformation of the perspective. However, in 3D cinema or television, the use of long focal length either creates a ``cardboard effect'' or causes visual divergence. To overcome this problem, state-of-the-art methods use disparity mapping techniques, which is a generalization of view interpolation, and generate new stereoscopic pairs from the two image sequences. We propose to use more than two cameras to s...

Perceiving Systems Talk Darren Cosker 02-09-2015 Applying Computer Vision and Graphics Research in Visual Effects and Entertainment The visual effects and entertainment industries are now a fundamental part of the computer graphics and vision landscapes - as well as impacting across society in general. One of the issues in this area is the creation of realistic characters, creating assets for production, and improving work-flow. Advances in computer graphics, vision and rendering have underlined much of the success of these industries, built on top of academic advances. However, there are still many unsolved problems. In this talk I will outline some of the challenges we have faced in crossing over academic research i... Silvia Zuffi

Perceiving Systems Talk Bojan Pepik 01-09-2015 Towards Richer Object Representations for Object Class Detection in Real World Images Current object class detection methods typically target 2D bounding box localization, encouraged by benchmark data sets, such as Pascal VOC. While this seems suitable for the detection of individual objects, higher-level applications, such as autonomous driving and 3D scene understanding, would benefit from more detailed and richer object hypotheses. In this talk I will present our recent work on building more detailed object class detectors, bridging the gap between higher level tasks and state-of-the-art object detectors. I will present a 3D object class detection method that can reliably...

Perceiving Systems Talk Luca del Pero 26-08-2015 Articulated motion discovery using pairs of trajectories Most computer vision systems cannot take advantage of the abundance of Internet videos as training data. This is because current methods typically learn under strong supervision and require expensive manual annotations. (e.g. videos need to be temporally trimmed to cover the duration of a specific action, object bounding boxes, etc.). In this talk, I will present two techniques that can lead to learning the behavior and the structure of articulated object classes (e.g. animals) from videos, with as little human supervision as possible. First, we discover the characteristic motion patterns o... Laura Sevilla

Optics and Sensing Laboratory Talk Felipe Guzman 29-07-2015 Novel optical sensing technologies Coherent light enables optical measurements of exquisite sensitivity, advancing technologies for improved sensing and autonomous systems. From my previous work on gravitational physics, I will present a brief overview on technologies for laser-interferometric gravitational-wave observatories, particularly within the scope of the European mission LISA Pathfinder, to be launched at the end 2015. In addition, I will talk about my current work in novel and highly compact optomechanical systems and photonic crystals, optical micro-resonators with sensitivities below femtometer levels, as ... Senya Polikovsky

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Kevin T. Kelly 27-07-2015 New Foundations for Ockham’s Razor in Statistical Inductive Inference, with Applications to Causal Discovery from Non-experimental Data In machine learning, the standard explanation of Ockham's razor is to minimize predictive risk. But prediction is interpreted passively---one may not rely on predictions to change the probability distribution used for training. That limitation may be overcome by studying alternatively manipulated systems in randomized experimental trials, but experiments on multivariate systems or on human subjects are often infeasible or immoral. Happily, the past three decades have witnessed the development of a range of statistical techniques for discovering causal relations from non-experimental dat... Michel Besserve Kun Zhang

Symposium 24-07-2015 Günter Petzow Colloquium (interesting speakers and talks - mostly in German) Seit 2002 veranstaltet das Institut am Standort Stuttgart ein wissenschaftliches Kolloquium, das der Kontaktpflege mit den Alumni und Freunden des Instituts dient. Wir bitten um Anmeldung bis 30. Juni 2015, entweder per Post oder unter: www.is.mpg.de/gpk2015

Talk Valentin Volchkov 16-07-2015 (Matter) Waves in disordered media The propagation of waves in inhomogeneous media is a vast subject, spanning many different research communities. The ability of waves to interfere leads to the celebrated phenomenon of Anderson localization. Constructive interference increases the probability of return and therefore it can reduce or even cancel the propagation in a disordered medium. Anderson localization was first predicted for electrons in 'dirty' condensed matter systems, very soon however, it was generalized to all kind of waves and has been studied since with light, microwaves, ultrasound, and ultra cold atoms. Here... Senya Polikovsky

Empirical Inference Conference 13-07-2015 - 24-07-2015 MLSS 2015 - Machine Learning Summer School 2015 in Tübingen MLSS's are a renowned venue for graduate students, researchers, and professionals. They offer an opportunity to learn about fundamental and advanced aspects of machine learning, data analysis and inference, from intellectual leaders of the field. <br> In the summer of 2015 the MLSS will make its fourth appearance in Tübingen. Michael Hirsch Philipp Hennig Bernhard Schölkopf

Symposium 12-07-2015 Symposium on Intelligent Systems in Science and Industry (SISSI) Symposium on Intelligent Systems / Alumni Meeting of MPI-IS: Claudia Daefler Matthias Tröndle

Perceiving Systems Talk Garrett Stanley 10-07-2015 Reading and Writing the Neural Code: Challenges in Neuroengineering The external world is represented in the brain as spatiotemporal patterns of electrical activity. Sensory signals, such as light, sound, and touch, are transduced at the periphery and subsequently transformed by various stages of neural circuitry, resulting in increasingly abstract representations through the sensory pathways of the brain. It is these representations that ultimately give rise to sensory perception. Deciphering the messages conveyed in the representations is often referred to as “reading the neural code”. True understanding of the neural code requires knowledge of not on... Jonas Wulff

Autonomous Motion Talk Gonzalo Rey 06-07-2015 Autonomous Systems At Moog The talk will briefly introduce Moog Inc. It will then describe Moog's view of its value proposition to robotics and autonomous systems. If robots and autonomous system are to achieve their enormous potential to positively impact the world economy, the technology has to achieve equivalent the levels of robustness, availability, reliability and safety that are expected from current solutions. The commercial aircraft industry has seen an order of magnitude increase in machine complexity in the last fifty years in order to reach the highest ever levels of cost per seat-mile and safety in it... Ludovic Righetti

Perceiving Systems Talk Trevor Darrell 26-06-2015 Perceptual representation learning across diverse modalities and domains Learning of layered or "deep" representations has provided significant advances in computer vision in recent years, but has traditionally been limited to fully supervised settings with very large amounts of training data. New results show that such methods can also excel when learning in sparse/weakly labeled settings across modalities and domains. I'll present our recent long-term recurrent network model which can learn cross-modal translation and can provide open-domain video to text transcription. I'll also describe state-of-the-art models for fully convolutional pixel-dense segmentati... Jonas Wulff

Autonomous Motion Talk Andre Seyfarth 16-06-2015 Biomechanics of legged locomotion - experiments, models, robots and assistive devices In this presentation a series of conceptual models for describing human and animal locomotion will be presented ranging from standing to walking and running. By subsequently increasing the complexity of the models we show that basic properties of the underlying spring-mass model can be inherited by the more detailed models. Model extensions include the consideration of a rigid trunk (instead of a point mass), non-elastic leg properties (instead of a mass-less leg spring), additional legs (two and four legs), leg masses, leg segments (e.g. a compliantly attached foot) and energy mana...

Autonomous Motion Talk Andre Seyfarth 16-06-2015 Biomechanics of legged locomotion - experiments, models, robots and assistive devices In this presentation a series of conceptual models for describing human and animal locomotion will be presented ranging from standing to walking and running. By subsequently increasing the complexity of the models we show that basic properties of the underlying spring-mass model can be inherited by the more detailed models. Model extensions include the consideration of a rigid trunk (instead of a point mass), non-elastic leg properties (instead of a mass-less leg spring), additional legs (two and four legs), leg masses, leg segments (e.g. a compliantly attached foot) and energy mana... Ludovic Righetti

Perceiving Systems Talk Rich Zemel 10-06-2015 Learning Rich and Fair Representations from Images and Text I will talk about two types of machine learning problems, which are important but have received little attention. The first are problems naturally formulated as learning a one-to-many mapping, which can handle the inherent ambiguity in tasks such as generating segmentations or captions for images. A second problem involves learning representations that are invariant to certain nuisance or sensitive factors of variation in the data while retaining as much of the remaining information as possible. The primary approach we formulate for both problems is a constrained form of joint emb... Gerard Pons-Moll

Max Planck Lecture Professor Wolfgang Ketterle 20-05-2015 Ultracold atoms as quantum simulators for new materials – synthetic magnetic fields and topological phases When atoms are cooled to nanokelvin temperatures, they can easily be confined and manipulated with laser beams. Their interactions can be tuned with the help of magnetic fields, making them strongly or weakly interacting, repulsive or attractive.

Perceiving Systems Talk Hans-Peter Seidel 18-05-2015 3D Image Analysis and Synthesis -- The World inside the Computer During the last three decades computer graphics established itself as a core discipline within computer science and information technology. Two decades ago, most digital content was textual. Today it has expanded to include audio, images, video, and a variety of graphical representations. New and emerging technologies such as multimedia, social networks, digital television, digital photography and the rapid development of new sensing devices, telecommunication and telepresence, virtual reality, or 3D-internet further indicate the potential of computer graphics...

Perceiving Systems Talk Andrea Vedaldi 04-05-2015 Learning and understanding visual representations Learnable representations, and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in particular, have become the preferred way of extracting visual features for image understanding tasks, from object recognition to semantic segmentation. In this talk I will discuss several recent advances in deep representations for computer vision. After reviewing modern CNN architectures, I will give an example of a state-of-the-art network in text spotting; in particular, I will show that, by using only synthetic data and a sufficiently large deep model, it is possible directly map image regions to Englis...

Event 10-04-2015 - 12-03-2015 DALI 2015 – Data, Learning and Inference The idea of DALI is to combine the special qualities of the former Snowbird meetings (intimate atmosphere, very good people, plenty of time to interact) with positive aspects of larger conferences that rarely take place in Europe. We decided for a three day format with two days of workshops, and one day of plenary talks in the middle, including a poster session. We chose an attractive location in a nearby time zone, which limits travel times for many of us who normally travel to meetings in the US. We have initially circulated this link only to a small list of people with the hope that we c...

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Cristian Sminchisescu 24-03-2015 From Perceptual Evidence to Large-Scale Visual Recognition Models Recent progress in computer-based visual recognition heavily relies on machine learning methods trained using large scale annotated datasets. While such data has made advances in model design and evaluation possible, it does not necessarily provide insights or constraints into those intermediate levels of computation, or deep structure, perceived as ultimately necessary in order to design reliable computer vision systems. This is noticeable in the accuracy of state of the art systems trained with such annotations, which still lag behind human performance in similar tasks. Nor does the exist...

Autonomous Motion Talk Auke Ijspeert 20-03-2015 Bio-inspired robotics and the use of robotics to validate neuro-mechanical models of animal locomotion Ludovic Righetti

Talk Neill Lawrence 18-03-2015 Modelling in the Context of Massively Missing Data In the age of large streaming data it seems appropriate to revisit the foundations of what we think of as data modelling. In this talk I'll argue that traditional statistical approaches based on parametric models and i.i.d. assumptions are inappropriate for the type of large scale machine learning we need to do in the age of massive streaming data sets. Particularly when we realise that regardless of the size of data we have, it pales in comparison to the data we could have. This is the domain of massively missing data. I'll be arguing for flexible non-parametric models as the answer. T... Jane Walters

Perceiving Systems Talk Benedetta Gennaro 11-03-2015 Of Breasts and Symbols: A Visual Journey through Twenty-Five Centuries of Western Art and Culture The breast is not just a protruding gland situated on the front of the thorax in female bodies: behind biology lies an intricate symbolism that has taken various and often contradictory meanings.  We begin our journey looking at pre-historic artifacts that revered the breast as the ultimate symbol of life; we then transition to the rich iconographical tradition centering on the so-called Virgo Lactans when the breast became a metaphor of nourishment for the entire Christian community. Next, we look at how artists have eroticized the breast in portraits of fifteenth-century French court...

Max Planck Lecture Vijay Kumar, Ph.D. 09-03-2015 Aerial Robot Swarms Autonomous micro aerial robots can operate in three-dimensional, indoor and outdoor environments, and have applications to search and rescue, first response and precision farming. I will describe the challenges in developing small, agile robots and the algorithmic challenges in the areas of (a) control and planning, (b) state estimation and mapping, and (c) coordinating large teams of robots.

Autonomous Motion Talk Ioannis Havoutis 09-03-2015 Quadrupedal locomotion: a planning & control framework for HyQ It is a great pleasure to invite you to the talk of Ioannis Havoutis (cf. info below) on Monday March 9th at 11h in the AMD seminar room (TTR building, first floor). have a nice week-end, ludovic Quadrupedal animals move with skill, grace and agility. Quadrupedal robots have made tremendous progress in the last few years. In this talk I will give an overview of our work with the Hydraulic Quadruped -HyQ- and present our latest framework for perception, planning and control of quadrupedal locomotion in challenging environments. In addition, I will give a short preview of our ... Ludovic Righetti

Perceiving Systems Talk Michael Tarr 26-02-2015 "Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time" (Terry Pratchett) How is it that biological systems can be so imprecise, so ad hoc, and so inefficient, yet accomplish (seemingly) simple tasks that still elude state-of-the-art artificial systems? In this context, I will introduce some of the themes central to CMU's new BrainHub Initiative by discussing: (1) The complexity and challenges of studying the mind and brain; (2) How the study of the mind and brain may benefit from considering contemporary artificial systems; (3) Why studying the mind and brain might be interesting (and possibly useful) to computer scientists.

Perceiving Systems Talk Paul G. Kry 24-02-2015 Balancing Speed and Fidelity in Physics Based Animation and Control In this talk I will give an overview of work I have done over the years exploring physically based simulation of contact, deformation, and articulated structures where there are trade-offs between computational speed and physical fidelity that can be made.  I will also discuss examples that mix data-driven and physically based approaches in animation and control.<br /> <br /> Paul Kry is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University.  He has a BMath from University of Waterloo, and MSc and PhD from University of British Columbia.  His res...

Perceiving Systems Talk Nikolaus F. Troje 18-02-2015 What is biological motion? <p> Everyone in visual psychology seems to know what Biological Motion is. Yet, it is not easy to come up with a definition that is specific enough to justify a distinct label, but is also general enough to include the many different experiments to which the term has been applied in the past. I will present a number of tasks, stimuli, and experiments, including some of my own work, to demonstrate the diversity and the appeal of the field of biological motion perception. In trying to come up with a definition of the term, I will particularly focus on a type of motion that has been consider...

Perceiving Systems Talk Vladlen Koltun 17-02-2015 Reconstructing Complete 3D Models from Single Images We present an approach to creating 3D models of objects depicted in Web images, even when each object may only be shown in a single image. Our approach uses a comparatively small collection of existing 3D models to guide the reconstruction process. These existing shapes are used to derive information about shape structure. Our guiding idea is to jointly analyze the images and the available 3D models. Joint analysis of all images along with the available shapes regularizes the formulated optimization problems, stabilizes estimation of camera parameters and construction of dense pixel-level c...

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Michael Goesele 16-02-2015 Reflecting in and on the Gradient Domain Image-based rendering has been introduced in the 1990s as an alternative approach to photorealistic rendering. Its key idea is to novel renderings by re-projecting pixels from nearby views. The basic approach works well for many scenes but breaks down if the scene contains “non-standard” elements such as reflective surfaces. In this talk, I will first show how we can extend image-based rendering to handle scenes with reflections. I will then discuss a novel gradient-based technique for image-based rendering that can intrinsically handle scenes with reflections.</pre>

Talk Katherine Kuchenbecker 26-01-2015 Haptics: The Technology of Touch When you touch objects in your surroundings, you can discern each item’ s physical properties from the rich array of haptic cues you experience, including both the tactile sensations arising in your skin and the kinesthetic cues originating in your muscles and joints. Although physical interaction with the world is at the core of human experience, few computer and machine interfaces provide the operator with high-fidelity touch feedback, limiting their usability . Similarly , autonomous robots rarely take advantag... Jane Walters

Autonomous Motion IS Colloquium Marco Claudio Campi 19-01-2015 Introduction to the Scenario Approach The scenario approach is a broad methodology to deal with decision-making in an uncertain environment. By resorting to observations, or by sampling uncertainty from a given model, one obtains an optimization problem (the scenario problem), whose solution bears precise probabilistic guarantees in relation to new, unseen, situations. The scenario approach opens up new avenues to address data-based problems in learning, identification, finance, and other fields. Sebastian Trimpe

Perceiving Systems Symposium 10-12-2014 - 13-12-2014 Scenes from Videos Workshop This invitation-only workshop will bring together experts in the field to focus on the problem of estimating Scenes from Video. In so doing, we hope to draw several lines of research together to address the problem of extracting physical and semantic information from video.

Event 23-11-2014 - 25-11-2014 Computer Vision Workshop As a follow up meeting on the RNLS (Research Network on Learning Systems) at the ETH Zürich in June 2014, we will organise the Computer Vision Breakout Meeting on the MPI IS Campus in Tuebingen. This meeting is to bring together researchers from both institutions, MPI IS and ETH Zürich, to exchange ideas, knowledge and experiences and learn from each other.

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