[Colloquium] TTIC Talks: George Papandreou, UCLA

[Liv Leader]

When:     Wednesday, February 27th at 11 a.m.

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room #526

Who:      George Papandreou, UCLA

Title:       Probabilistic Machine Learning in Computer Vision and
Multimodal Perception

Machine learning allows us to automatically reason about data. It plays an
increasingly important role in building computer vision and multimodal
perception systems which are able to interpret the ever growing volume of
images and videos available in digital form. In these domains we typically
deal with complex sensory signals that feature strongly stochastic aspects
such as missing data and noisy measurements.

Probabilistic Bayesian machine learning methods are particularly well-suited
for describing such ambiguous data, providing a natural conceptual framework
for quantifying the uncertainty in interpreting them. I will illustrate with
examples from my work in image modeling, computer vision, and audiovisual
speech recognition, that the Bayesian approach can be very fruitful in
practical applications, allowing us to learn model parameters and adaptively
fuse heterogeneous information sources in a principled fashion.

Despite these advantages, applying probabilistic techniques to large-scale
data such as those arising in computer vision can pose significant
computational challenges and alternative optimization-based deterministic
methods are often preferred. I will describe my recent research on
Perturb-and-MAP random sampling which brings powerful techniques from
optimization into probabilistic modeling, making Bayesian inference
computationally tractable for challenging computer vision problems such as
image inpainting and deblurring, image segmentation, and scene labeling.

Host: Raquel Urtasun, rurtasun at ttic.edu

-- 
Liv Leader
Director of Human Resources and International Affairs

Toyota Technological Institute Chicago
6045 S Kenwood Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone- (773) 702-5033
Fax-     (773) 834-9881
Email-  lleader at ttic.edu
Web-   www.ttic.edu
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