Thursday, April 28, 2011

vision talks at CMU are the best

At CMU, we get some of the best people in object recognition to visit and give talks.  The CMU VASC seminar is a place where all the cool vision researchers come and advertise their own research.  Just last week Deva Ramanan gave a spectacular talk about his most recent part-based detector.  Deva made an everlasting impression on me as a first year PhD student -- 5 years ago he showed the world that visualizations of person's parts as marginals are much sexier than just boxes.

Deva's Sexy Part Marginals

Today, Rob Fergus gave a talk on his most recent deep learning research.  This research topic has been promulgated by hardcore machine learning titans such as Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, and Geoff Hinton, so it will be exciting to see how Rob applies these ideas to object recognition.  Unsupervised Feature Learning seems pretty exciting; unfortunately, I just cannot take results on Caltech101/Caltech256 very seriously :-(

Deep Learning Learning Architectures