Events & Talks

Perceiving Systems Talk Eldar Insafutdinov 26-09-2019 Inferring the models of rigid and articulated objects from images: from 2D keypoints to 3D shape and appearance In the first part of the talk, I am going to present our work on human pose estimation in the Wild, capturing unconstrained images and videos containing an a priori unknown number of people, often occluded and exhibiting a wide range of articulations and appearances. Unlike conventional top-down approaches that first detect humans with the off-the-shelf object detector and then estimate poses independently per bounding box, our formulation performs joint detection and pose estimation. In the first stage we indiscriminately localise body parts of every person in the image with the state-of-t... David Hoffmann Siyu Tang

Physical Intelligence Talk Mirko Kovac 26-09-2019 Soft Aerial Robotics for Infrastructure Manufacturing Future cities and infrastructure systems will evolve into complex conglomerates where autonomous aerial, aquatic and ground-based robots will coexist with people and cooperate in symbiosis. To create this human-robot ecosystem, robots will need to respond more flexibly, robustly and efficiently than they do today. They will need to be designed with the ability to move across terrain boundaries and physically interact with infrastructure elements to perform sensing and intervention tasks. Taking inspiration from nature, aerial robotic systems can integrate multi-functional morphology, new ma... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Jean-Louis Thonnard 25-09-2019 From Fingertip Skin Mechanics to Dexterous Object Manipulation Fingertip skin friction plays a critical role during object manipulation. We will describe a simple and reliable method to estimate the fingertip static coefficient of friction (CF) continuously and quickly during object manipulation, and we will describe a global expression of the CF as a function of the normal force and fingertip moisture. Then we will show how skin hydration modifies the skin deformation dynamics during grip-like contacts. Certain motor behaviours observed during object manipulation could be explained by the effects of skin hydration. Then the biomechanics of the partial... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker David Gueorguiev

Physical Intelligence Talk Peter Blümler 25-09-2019 Mag-Guider: permanent magnet systems to steer and image superparamagnetic A new concept of using permanent magnet systems for guiding superparamagnetic nano-particles (SPP) on arbitrary trajectories over a large volume is presented. The same instrument can also be used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using the inherent contrast of the SPP [1]. The basic idea is to use one magnet system, which provides a strong, homogeneous, dipolar magnetic field to magnetize and orient the particles, and a second constantly graded, quadrupolar field, superimposed on the first, to generate a force on the oriented particles. As a result, particles are guided with constant f... Metin Sitti

Talk Prof. Zrenner, Eberhard 23-09-2019 Restitution of Vision in Blinding Retinal Diseases: Gene Replacement Therapy and Retinal Prosthesis

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Dr. Michael Muehlebach 19-09-2019 A Dynamical Systems Perspective on Optimization with Momentum My talk will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will analyze Nesterov's accelerated gradient method from a dynamical systems point of view. More precisely, I will derive the accelerated gradient method by discretizing an ordinary differential equation with a semi-implicit Euler integration scheme. I will analyze both the ordinary differential equation and the discretization for obtaining insights into the phenomenon of acceleration. In particular, geometric properties of the dynamics, such as asymptotic stability, time-reversibility, and phase-space volume contraction are shown... Sebastian Trimpe

Perceiving Systems Talk Taras Kucherenko 19-09-2019 How to make your agent gesture in a natural way? Conversational agents in the form of virtual agents or social robots are rapidly becoming wide-spread. Humans use non-verbal behaviors to signal their intent, emotions and attitudes in human-human interactions. Conversational agents therefore need this ability as well in order to make an interaction pleasant and efficient. An important part of non-verbal communication is gesticulation: gestures communicate a large share of non-verbal content. Previous systems for gesture production were typically rule-based and could not represent the range of human gestures. Recently the gesture generation... Mohamed Hassan Soubhik Sanyal

Dynamic Locomotion Event 17-09-2019 - 18-09-2019 Workshop organized at Bernstein conference 2019, Berlin On September 17-18, Charlotte and Alexander are organising the workshop: 'Integrating neuroscience and biomechanics: the neuromechanics of motor coordination in humans and other animals'. This is a satellite workshop prior to the Bernstein conference 2019 in Berlin. Join us these two days, for an exciting line of speakers (see link 'more information'). Charlotte Le Mouel Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Ernest (Ted) Gomez, MD, MTR 11-09-2019 Haptic Intelligence in Surgical Learning - Lessons from Laparoscopy and Robotics Surgery is a demanding activity that places a human life in the hands of others. However, innovations in minimally invasive surgery have physically separated surgeons' hands from their patients, creating the need for surgeons and their tools to develop both natural and artificial haptic intelligence. This lecture examines the essential role of haptic intelligence in skill development for laparoscopic and robotic surgery. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Prof. Martina Maggio 10-09-2019 Feedback-Control for Self-Adaptive Predictable Computing Cloud computing gives the illusion of infinite computational capacity and allows for on-demand resource provisioning. As a result, over the last few years, the cloud computing model has experienced widespread industrial adoption and companies like Netflix offloaded their entire infrastructure to the cloud. However, with even the largest datacenter being of a finite size, cloud infrastructures have experienced overload due to overbooking or transient failures. In essence, this is an excellent opportunity for the design of control solutions, that tackle the problem of mitigating overload peak... Sebastian Trimpe

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Zhaoping Li 03-09-2019 A New Framework to Understanding Biological Vision Visual attention selects a tiny amount of information that can be deeply processed by the brain, and gaze shifts bring the selected visual object to fovea, the center of the visual field, for better visual decoding or recognition of the selected objects. Therefore, central and peripheral vision should differ qualitatively in visual decoding, rather than just quantitatively in visual acuity. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk Björn Browatzki 22-08-2019 Robust Discrimination and Generation of Faces using Compact, Disentangled Embeddings Current solutions to discriminative and generative tasks in computer vision exist separately and often lack interpretability and explainability. Using faces as our application domain, here we present an architecture that is based around two core ideas that address these issues: first, our framework learns an unsupervised, low-dimensional embedding of faces using an adversarial autoencoder that is able to synthesize high-quality face images. Second, a supervised disentanglement splits the low-dimensional embedding vector into four sub-vectors, each of which contains separated information abo... Timo Bolkart

Talk Dr. Tang, Siyu 21-08-2019 Learning to See People in Complex Scenes: Algorithms, Results and Open Challenges

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Gunhyuk Park 09-08-2019 Illusive and Realistic Vibrotactile Feedback: 2D Phantom Sensation and Vibrotactile Dimensional Reduction Many hapticians have designed and implemented haptic effects to various user interactions. For several decades, hapticians have proved that the haptic feedback can improve multiple facets of user experience including task performance, analyzing and utilizing user perception, and substituting other sensory modalities. Among them, this talk introduces two representative rendering methods to provide vibrotactile effects to users: 2D phantom sensation that makes a user perceive illusive tactile perception by using multiple real vibrotactile actuators and vibrotactile dimensional reduction that ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Dr. Kelber, Almut 31-07-2019 Bird colour vision in context

Perceiving Systems Talk Yoshihiro Kanamori 30-07-2019 Relighting Humans: Occlusion-Aware Inverse Rendering for Full-Body Human Images Relighting of human images has various applications in image synthesis. For relighting, we must infer albedo, shape, and illumination from a human portrait. Previous techniques rely on human faces for this inference, based on spherical harmonics (SH) lighting. However, because they often ignore light occlusion, inferred shapes are biased and relit images are unnaturally bright particularly at hollowed regions such as armpits, crotches, or garment wrinkles. This paper introduces the first attempt to infer light occlusion in the SH formulation directly. Based on supervised learning using conv... Senya Polikovsky Jinlong Yang

Perceiving Systems Talk Chengde Wan 23-07-2019 Self-supervised 3D hand pose estimation Deep learning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art for 3D hand pose estimation, of which accuracy can be improved with increased amounts of labelled data. However, acquiring 3D hand pose labels can be extremely difficult. In this talk, I will present our recent two works on leveraging self-supervised learning techniques for hand pose estimation from depth map. In both works, we incorporate differentiable renderer to the network and formulate training loss as model fitting error to update network parameters. In first part of the talk, I will present our earlier work which approximates... Dimitris Tzionas

Physical Intelligence Talk Richard T Bryan 22-07-2019 - 22-04-2019 An introduction to bladder cancer & challenges for translational research

IS Colloquium Christoph Keplinger 17-07-2019 Robotic materials for the intelligent systems of the future: From soft robotics to energy capture Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors based on metal and magnets, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, makes extensive use of soft materials and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. The Keplinger Lab aims to fundamentally challenge current limitations of robotic hardware, using an interdisciplinary approach that synergizes concepts from soft matter physics and chemistry with advanced engineering technologies to introduce r...

Physical Intelligence Talk Joseph B. Tracy 16-07-2019 Magnetically and Optically Active Nanoparticles and Polymer Composites Magnetic fields and light can be used to assemble, manipulate, and heat nanoparticles (NPs) and to remotely actuate polymer composites. Simple soft robots will be presented, where incorporation of magnetic and plasmonic NPs makes them responsive to magnetic fields and light. Application of magnetic fields to dispersions of magnetic NPs drives their assembly into chains. Dipolar coupling within the chains is a source of magnetic anisotropy, and chains of magnetic NPs embedded in a polymer matrix can be used to program the response of soft robots, while still using simple architectures. Wavel... Metin Sitti

Perceiving Systems Talk Shunsuke Saito 10-07-2019 Robust and High-Fidelity Human Digitization from Minimal Inputs Realistic digital avatars are increasingly important in digital media with potential to revolutionize 3D face-to-face communication and social interactions through compelling digital embodiment of ourselves. My goal is to efficiently create high-fidelity 3D avatars from a single image input, captured in an unconstrained environment. These avatars must be close in quality to those created by professional capture systems, yet require minimal computation and no special expertise from the user. These requirements pose several significant technical challenges. A single photograph provides only p... Timo Bolkart

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marco Huber 09-07-2019 Cognitive Production Systems – AI in Production Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart is one of the largest institutes within the Fraunhofer Society with a strong focus on production technologies and automation. Research and technology transfer efforts on machine learning and artificial intelligence are concentrated at IPA’s Center for Cyber Cognitive Intelligence (CCI). This talk gives an introduction to CCI‘s mission and typical industrial applications being addressed. Furthermore, an overview of the research areas and a deep dive into selected topics are provided. Examples are 6D pose estimation for robotic bin-picking, explainable machine lear... Sebastian Trimpe

IS Colloquium Uri Shalit 08-07-2019 Uri Shalit - Causal Inference and Machine Learning: a Two-Way Street Where does causal thinking meet machine learning? We will discuss several such cases. We first show how we use learning theory to guide us in building algorithms for inferring individual-level causal effects, and how we apply these ideas to create deep-learning causal-effect inference methods. We then show how ideas from causal inference can help us in two important machine learning tasks: learning robust classifiers and interpreting deep image recognition system. If time permits, we’ll discuss a recent application of machine learning for learning individualized treatments for patients in a... Krikamol Muandet

Event 05-07-2019 2019 Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium MPI-IS cordially invites you to attend for the 2019 Summer Colloquium Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Matthias Tröndle Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Florent Di Meglio 01-07-2019 Thermoacoustic instabilities: various approaches to estimation and control Reducing the size and emissions of gas turbine engines used in the aeronautics industry forces manufacturers to explore new operating conditions. An undesirable phenomenon called thermo-acoustic instabilities may occur, caused by the coupling between combustion dynamics and the acoustics of the combustion chamber. To help predict, detect and suppress it, we explore various approaches. We will discuss the design of observers for infinite-dimensional systems, Fourier-based reduced-order modeling as well as a Machine-Learning approach based on high-fidelity simulation data. Sebastian Trimpe Mona Buisson-Fenet

Autonomous Vision Event 30-06-2019 - 07-07-2019 3rd Computational Vision Summer School The 3rd Computational Vision Summer School offers a broad perspective on biological vision and computer vision with a thorough understanding of the theoretical and computational challenges involved. The school is unique in bringing together people from diverse disciplines who all share a computational view of vision. The faculty consists of renowned senior researchers in the field, teaching lectures and providing hands-on tutorials on topics ranging from early vision to image understanding. Michael Black Andreas Geiger Siyu Tang

Physical Intelligence Talk Prof. Shu Yang 28-06-2019 Programming Intelligence through Geometry, Topology, and Anisotropy Geometry is concerned with the properties of configurations of points, lines, and circles, while topology is concerned with space, dimension, and transformation. Geometry is also materials independent and scale invariant. By introducing holes and cuts in 2D sheets, we demonstrate dramatic shape change and super-conformability via expanding or collapsing of the hole arrays without deforming individual lattice units. When choosing the cuts and geometry correctly, we show folding into the third dimension, known as kirigami. The kirigami structures can be rendered pluripotent, that is changing ...

Software Workshop Talk Adriane Boyd 25-06-2019 Using Wikipedia Edits in Low Resource Grammatical Error Correction We develop a grammatical error correction system for German using a small gold corpus augmented with edits extracted from Wikipedia revision history. We extend the automatic error annotation tool ERRANT (Bryant et al., 2017) for German and use it to analyze both gold corrections and Wikipedia edits (Grundkiewicz and Junczys-Dowmunt, 2014) in order to select as additional training data Wikipedia edits containing grammatical corrections similar to those in the gold corpus. Using a neural machine translation approach (Chollampatt and Ng, 2018), we evaluate the contribution of Wikipedia edits a... Jean-Claude Passy

Talk Dr. Mallot, Hans-Peter 18-06-2019 The structure of cognitive space: from geometry to behavior

Talk Dr. Visscher, Kristina 17-06-2019 How do the connections of central and peripheral V1 relate to the functions of central and peripheral vision?

Talk Günther, Mathias 12-06-2019 The mesoscale effect of engagement onto the cortical activity during a 2-AFC tactile detection Task

Perceiving Systems Talk Dr Antonia Tzemanaki 05-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Dimitris Tzionas

Haptic Intelligence Talk Yasemin Vardar 04-06-2019 Career-Building Strategies for Postdocs and Ph.D. Students Sign-Up! is a career-building program for female post-docs in the Max Planck Society. This program aims to prepare post-doctoral researchers for their future scientific careers by several interactive training sessions and networking activities. As a selected member of this program, I will summarize the workshops that I participated in this year. My talk will cover topics about success factors in scientific careers, career planning, professional communication and leadership, self-presentation, and research funding. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr Antonia Tzemanaki 03-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Prof. Bach, Michael 27-05-2019 Imaging in our brain – Optical illusions neither “trick the eye” nor “fool the brain

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Caroline G. L. Cao, Ph.D. 23-05-2019 Human Factors Research in Minimally Invasive Surgery Health care is probably the last remaining unsafe critical system. A large proportion of reported medical errors occur in the hospital operating room (OR), a highly complex sociotechnical environment. As technology is being introduced into the OR faster than surgeons can learn to use them, surgical errors result from the unfamiliar instrumentation, increased motoric, perceptual and cognitive demands on the surgeons, as well as the lack of adequate training. Effective technology design for minimally invasive surgery requires an understanding of the system constraints of remote surgery, and t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Dr. Stednitz, Sarah 06-05-2019 The social brain of zebrafish

Perceiving Systems Talk Jinlong Yang 03-05-2019 Modeling shape space of clothed human using a learning approach In the past few years, significant progress has been made on shape modeling of human body, face, and hands. Yet clothing shape is currently not well presented. Modeling clothing using physics-based simulation can sometimes involve tedious manual work and heavy computation. Therefore, a data-driven learning approach has emerged in the community. In this talk, I will present a stream of work that targeted to learn the shape of clothed human from captured data. It involves 3D body estimation, clothing surface registration and clothing deformation modeling. I will conclude this talk by outlini... Timo Bolkart

Talk Dr. Urartu Şeker 02-05-2019 Biological Devices: Self-Actuated Protein Delivery Systems Programming cellular devices to deliver proteins or small molecules using synthetic genetic regulation can be employed in many areas such as biomedicine, living therapeutics, living materials and many others. A biological device composed of a cellular sensor coupled with a programmed protein delivery system can lead the formation of a synthetic system that can sense the environmental inputs, carry out calculations and create an output. Using this approach, we have built cellular devices those can sense environmental signals and creates an output in the form of protein secretion. In this tal...

Perceiving Systems Talk Marilyn Keller 26-04-2019 Using RGB-D cameras for scene streaming and navigation in virtual reality Since the release of the Kinect, RGB-D cameras have been used in several consumer devices, including smartphones. In this talk, I will present two challenging uses of this technology. With multiple RGB-D cameras, it is possible to reconstruct a 3D scene and visualize it from any point of view. In the first part of the talk, I will show how such a scene can be streamed and rendered as a point cloud in a compelling way and its appearance improved by the use of external cinema cameras. In the second part of the talk, I will present my work on how an RGB-D camera can be used for enabling real-w... Sergi Pujades

Modern Magnetic Systems Max Planck Lecture Victorino Franco 23-04-2019 Magnetocaloric Effect: From Energy Efficient Refrigeration to Fundamental Studies of Phase Transitions Joachim Gräfe Michael Hirscher

Empirical Inference Talk Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber 11-04-2019 Unsupervised Learning: Passiv and Active I’ll start with a concept of 1990 that has become popular: unsupervised learning without a teacher through two adversarial neural networks (NNs) that duel in a minimax game, where one NN minimizes the objective function maximized by the other. The first NN generates data through its output actions, the second NN predicts the data. The second NN minimizes its error, thus becoming a better predictor. But it is a zero sum game: the first NN tries to find actions that maximize the error of the second NN. The system exhibits what I called “artificial curiosity” because the first NN is motivated ... Bernhard Schölkopf

Talk Prof. Zhaoping Li 10-04-2019 A new path to understanding vision: theory and experiments Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research

Physical Intelligence Talk Jérôme Casas 04-04-2019 Vignettes of physical ecology of insects and insect based bio-inspiration Insect chemical ecology is a mature, long standing field, with its own journal. By contrast, insect physical ecology is much less studied and the worked scattered. Using work done in my group, I will highlight locomotion, both in granular materials like sand and at the water surface as well as sensing, in particular olfaction and flow sensing. The bio-inspired implementations in MEMS technologies will be the closing chapter. Metin Sitti

Event 28-03-2019 Girls‘ Day 2019 – Stuttgarter Max-Planck-Campus macht wieder mit Schülerinnen entdecken den spannenden Beruf der Wissenschaftlerin Barbara Kettemann

Talk Herke van Hoof 25-03-2019 Modularity and transfer in reinforcement learning Learning new control strategies for (possibly unknown) dynamical systems is a challenging task. Reinforcement learning algorithms typically require 'fresh' data regularly, but obtaining data safely and in sufficient quantities is a challenge on real systems. Thus, it is no surprise that most recent successes have been in domains where massive amounts of data can easily be generated in simulation (e.g., games such as Atari and Go). Georg Martius Mara Cascianelli

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Benjamin Bloem-Reddy 25-03-2019 Probabilistic symmetry and invariant neural networks In an effort to improve the performance of deep neural networks in data-scarce, non-i.i.d., or unsupervised settings, much recent research has been devoted to encoding invariance under symmetry transformations into neural network architectures. We treat the neural network input and output as random variables, and consider group invariance from the perspective of probabilistic symmetry. Drawing on tools from probability and statistics, we establish a link between functional and probabilistic symmetry, and obtain functional representations of probability distributions that are invariant or eq... Isabel Valera

Talk Dr. Huang, Melody 24-03-2019 From tank to bedside: Larval zebrafish as models to study adaptive sensorimotor behaviors in the optokinetic system in both healthy and diseased conditions.

Physical Intelligence Talk Sangram Bagh 21-03-2019 Reprogramming Microbial Cells With An Engineering Language The molecular connectivity between genes and proteins inside a cell shows a good degree of resemblance with complex electrical circuits. This inspires the possibility of engineering a cell similar to an engineering device by plugging in genetic logic circuits. This approach, which is loosely defined as synthetic biology is an emerging field of bioengineering, where scientist use electrical and computer engineering principle to re-program cellular functions with a potential to solve next generation challenges in medicine, materials, energy, and space travel. In this talk, we discuss our effo... Metin Sitti

Talk Dr. Vinck, Martin 20-03-2019 Cell-type-specific burst-firing, stimulus-selectivity and synchronization in macaque V1

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