Date: Aug. 29, 2pm

Speaker: Leo Guibas

Deep knowledge of the world is necessary if we are to have autonomous and intelligent agents and artifacts that can assist us in everyday activities, or even carry out tasks entirely independently. One way to factorize the complexity of the world is to associate information and knowledge with stable entities, animate or inanimate, such as persons or vehicles, etc -- what we generally refer to as "objects."

In this talk I'll survey a number of recent efforts whose aim is to create and annotate reference representations for (inanimate) objects based on 3D models with the aim of delivering such information to new observations, as needed. In this object-centric view, the goal is to learn about object geometry, appearance, articulation, materials, physical properties, affordances, and functionality. We acquire such information in a multitude of ways, both from crowd-sourcing and from establishing direct links between models and signals, such as images, videos, and 3D scans -- and through these to language and text. The purity of the 3D representation allows us to establish robust maps and correspondences for transferring information among the 3D models themselves -- making our current 3D repository, ShapeNet, a true network. 

While neural network architectures have had tremendous impact in image understanding and language processing, their adaptation to 3D data is not entirely straightforward. The talk will also briefly discuss current approaches in designing deep nets appropriate for operating directly on irregular 3D data representations, such as meshes or point clouds, both for analysis and synthesis -- as well as ways to learn object function from observing multiple action sequences involving objects -- in support of the above program.

Date: Sept. 5, 2pm

Speaker: Sahaana Suri (Stanford)

While data volumes generated by sensors, automated process, and application telemetry continue to rise, the capacity of human attention remains limited. To harness the potential of these large scale data streams, machines must step in by processing, aggregating, and contextualizing significant behaviors within these data streams. This talk will describe progress towards achieving this goal via MacroBase, a new analytics engine for prioritizing attention in this large-scale "fast data" that has begun to deliver results in several production environments. Key to this progress are new methods for constructing cascades of analytic operators for classification, aggregation, and high-dimensional feature selection; when combined, these cascades yield new opportunities for dramatic scalability improvements via end-to-end optimization for streams spanning time-series, video, and structured data. MacroBase is a core component of the Stanford DAWN project (http://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/), a new research initiative designed to enable more usable and efficient machine learning infrastructure.

Date: Sept. 26, 2pm

Speaker: Jeffrey Scargle (NASA)

Bayesian Blocks (1207.5578) is an O(N**2) dynamic programming algorithm to compute exact global optimal segmentations of sequential data of arbitrary mode and dimensionality. Multivariate data, generalized block shapes, and higher dimensional data are easily treated. Incorporating a simple pruning method yields a (still exact) O(N) algorithm allowing fast analysis of series of ~100M data points. Sample applications include analysis of X- and gamma-ray time series, identification of GC-islands in the human genome, data-adaptive triggers and histograms, and elucidating the Cosmic Web from 3D galaxy redshift data.