CB's (ex-, non-, and current) Students (Sept 2002)

Where Eagles Dare...

Pointers to ftp-able papers (compressed postscript) appear scattered throughout this page. They and others are available from ftp.cs.rochester.edu in directory pub/papers/systems, .../ai, .../robotics, or (if your browser supports it) by following the link.

Computer Vision Class

The students (mostly 2nd year grads but some undergrads and a MS student) in the computer vision class did several projects, usually working in small teams of 2-4. They build and used color segmentation tools in a domain inspired by the Kodak Picture Exchange (KPX). KPX is a way to acquire PhotoCD images over a network via a relational database and user interface, initially for commercial photography. We worked on extracting some of the relevant image properties automatically (such as predominant color, accent color, and empty space where advertising copy could go). The final projects integrated robot control, Jacobian learning (so no hand-eye calibration was needed), and vision. One group used a robot arm, 4-finger manipulator, and two TV cameras to perform pick-and-place tasks on objects that the user clicked in a TV image (this is an example of "deictic control"). A forthcoming Tech. Report will explicate all the various technical details -- watch this spot for an anchor). The other group "herded" a mobile lego tractor along the shortest path through a maze.

Ray Rimey (1993)

Control of Selective Perception Using Bayes Nets and Decision Theory . It is not on the ftp server but may be ordered from the C.S. Department for $6.50 as Technical Report 468. Ray is now employed at Martin Marietta Corporation in their autonomous vehicle project.

Ricardo Bianchini (1995)

Ricardo is actually a systems student, but he did some interesting work with Brown that explicated some tradeoffs in communication, parallelism, and performance in genetic algorithms. The work was implemented on Transputers, as part of a feasibility test to determine if Transputers were part of the future of the robot lab. They weren't; a SparcStation 2000 Multiprocessor will be the new main computational and control engine in the Vision and Robot Lab. Some of the results of the parallel GA studies are in systems/93.tr436.parallel_genetic_algorithms.ps.Z.

Jeff Schneider (1994)

Jeff should be graduating in August of 1994. His work is in learning robot control, and he has been building up a theory of motor skill acquisition. His work can be found in ICRA: Schneider, J. G. and C. M. Brown. ``Robot Skill Learning, Basis Functions, and Control Regimes.'' Proc., IEEE Conf. on Robotics and Automation, May 1993. Also there are some TRs on line at UR: robotics/92.tr437.robot_skill_learning_and_basis_function_choice.ps.Z relates early work on learning coefficients of joint velocity basis functions, and robotics/93.tr458.high_dimension_action_spaces_in_robot_skill_learning.ps.Z describes more recent work in learning that includes extrapolation from known trajectories.

Bob Wisniewski (1995)

Bob graduated in 1995, went to work for SGI, and now is at T.J. Watson. Bob's thesis work is on the interface between large, complex, parallel systems that embody soft real-time jobs (like reasoning, planning, world simulation for prediction, truth maintenance...) and hard real-time constraints (reading sensors, updating controllers...). As befits a student on the systems and AI interface, he has systems professors (LeBlanc and Scott) on his committee, and is doing work with Scott and Kontothanassis on synchronization mechanisms that are affected by the state of the job scheduler. A not-too-recent description of Bob's research directions is in 93.PDRTS.Ephor_runtime_environment_for_parallel_intelligent_apps.ps.Z, and a more recent one is 94.RTOSS.An_argument_for_a_runtime_layer_in_sparta_design.ps.Z. A Recent technical report with von Kaenel gives many technical details of a real-world implementation.

Peter von Kaenel (1994)

Peter finished his 3-2 BS-MS program in 1994, and has for three years been a pillar of strength for several graduate students to whose projects he has contributed. His recent work with Ray Rimey was implementing a dynamic version of Bayes nets to control selective perception in a world of moving objects, described in robotics/93.tr466.goal_oriented_dynamic_vision.ps.Z. Most recently he has been implementing Bob Wisniewski's "shepherding" domain in the lab; the idea is to track moving lego vehicles visually and to herd them with a mechanical arm to keep as many of them confined in a small area as possible.

James Vallino (1997)

Jim's thesis was on various aspects of augmented reality, from the use of affine coordinates for speed (and to avoid calibration) to implementations of obscuration effect to haptic AR. See Jim's page for the canonical collection of information on augmented reality. Jim is a tenured professor at RIT, where he has been since 1998. Jim has been working closely with Kyros Kutulakos.

Rodrigo Carceroni (1998)

See Rodrigo's page for a nice MPEG of our automated wheelchair following him around. He is doing work on pose recovery algorithms as well.

Amit Singhal (2000)

Amit's thesis was on is working on Bayesian and probabilistic methods for detection of interesting properties in comsumer images (such as what the main subject probably was meant to be). His work has applications in mobile robot navigation and multi-sensor fusion.

Where Eagles Dare II ...

Mike Van Wie (2001)

After a stint out West creatively writing and working for Motorola, Mike is now in town at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mike's thesis was on multi-agent plan creation and organization, taking place without specific communication or negotiation; mediated only through observation, which amounts to plan recognition. Thus his work is distantly related to the TRAINS and TRIPS work of Allen et al.

Chris Eveland (2002)

Chris is working at Equinox corporation; his thesis is on the properties and applications (tracking, face recognition) of new IR sensors. He spent the summers of 98 and 99 at SRI International, working with Bob Bolles and Kurt Konolige, on the SRI small vision module and associated applications. Summer of 2000 was spent with Equinox Corporation.

Stephen Li (2002)

Stephen is now at the University of Delaware after receiving his MS degree here. In the summer of 2001 Stephen had an internship at IBM Almaden, and he is interested in teleconference implementations and related visual algorithms. A UR Technical Report describing some of his latest results is available in Here are the locations of the .gz/.pdf files of the TR postscript or pdf. And some related teleconference presentation overheads are available in html or pdf.

Bo Hu (2003)

Bo is working on rendering high-quality appearance interactions in augmented reality (e.g. shadows from virtual onto real objects and vice-versa, real objects obscuring virtual ones and vice-versa). He has spent a summer at Siemens Corp. Research doing augmented reality, and a year putting together an AR system at the Dept. of Neurosurgery at UR. His page says what we are up to, and there are two recent TRs:

B. Hu and C. Brown, ``Interactive Indoor Scene Reconstruction From Image Mosaics Using Cuboid Structure'', University of Rochester Technical Report 787, August 2002.

B. Hu and C. Brown, ``Acquiring An Environment Map Through Image Mosaicking'', University of Rochester Technical Report 786, November 2001.

Matt Boutell (2003)

Matt is working on improved techniques for classifying scenes into semantic categories. He has spent two summers working at Eastman Kodak Company's Imaging Science and Technology Lab. As with Singhal, his main technical supervision comes from Jiebo Luo and Bob Gray of Kodak.

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