Robots, Humans and Action

Stephen Gould is a Professor in the Research School of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University. He received his BSc degree in mathematics and computer science and BE degree in electrical engineering from the University of Sydney in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He received his MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. He then worked in industry for a number of years where he co-founded Sensory Networks, which sold to Intel in 2013. In 2005 he returned to PhD studies and earned his PhD degree from Stanford University in 2010. His research interests include computer and robotic vision, machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, deep learning and optimization.

In 2017, Steve spent a year in Seattle leading a team of computer vision researchers and engineers at Amazon before returning to Australia in 2018.

Chief Investigator Professor Hongdong Li has been with the College of Engineering and Computer Science, the Australian National University (ANU). He joined the ANU Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering (RSISE) from 2004 first as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Fellow and a Senior Fellow. He was seconded to National ICT Australia (NICTA) as a Senior Research Scientist during 2008-2010 working on the Australia Bionic Eye Project. From 2010 he took a tenured position with ANU, doing teaching and research in computer vision and robotics at ANU. He as one of the fouding CIs joined the ACRV since 2014. During 2017—2018 he was a Visiting Professor with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh.

Richard is renowned as the founder of the field of multi-view geometry in computer vision – his text has received over 12500 citations.  Richard has been at the Australian National University since January 2001. He is also the Program Leader for the Autonomous Systems and Sensor Technology Program of NICTA.  Richard worked at the General Electric Research and Development Center from 1985 to 2001. He became involved with Image Understanding and Scene Reconstruction working with GE’s Simulation and Control Systems Division which built large-scale flight-simulators.

From 1995 he was GE project leader for a shared-vision project with Lockheed-Martin involving design and implementation of algorithms for an AFIS (fingerprint analysis) system being developed under a Lockheed-Martin contract with the FBI. This involved work in feature extraction, interactive fingerprint editing and fingerprint database matching. In 2000, he co-authored (with Andrew Zisserman) a book for Cambridge University Press, summarizing the previous decade’s research in this area. (Over 34,000 citations and an h-index of 57).

Dylan joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in August 2018. Previously, he was a PhD student at ANU and Data61/CSIRO, where he worked on geometric vision problems, and a research assistant in the Cyber-Physical Systems group of Data61/CSIRO, where he worked on Resource Constrained Vision.  Dylan received a BE in Mechatronic Engineering from the University of New South Wales. He has broad research interests within computer vision and robotics, including geometric vision and human-centred vision. In particular, he has investigated geometric sensor data alignment problems, such as camera localisation, simultaneous localisation and mapping, and structure from motion.

He is currently looking at the problems of recognising, modelling, and predicting human actions, poses and human-object interactions with a view to facilitate robot-human interaction as part of a Centre project.

Xin Yu was a research fellow at Australian National University (ANU). He received his Ph.D degree from the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof. Richard Hartley, Fatih Porikli and Basura Fernando. He also obtained a Ph.D from Tsinghua University, China, under the supervision of Prof. Li Zhang.

Xin is now a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney.

Fatemeh joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in January 2019. Prior to that, she was a PhD student at Australian National University and Data61-CSIRO, working on weakly-supervised semantic segmentation of images and videos. Within the Centre, she is now working on the problem of video understanding and latent-variable generative models, with the focus on multiple object tracking, human motion prediction, and video activity analysis.

Itzik joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) node in July 2019. Previously, he was a Ph.D. student at Technion Israel Institute of Technology where he worked on “Classification, segmentation, and geometric analysis of 3D point clouds using deep learning” under the supervision of Prof. Anath Fischer and Michael Lindenbaum.

Itzik completed his Bsc. Cum Laude in 2008 (Mechanical Engineering, Technion) and his Msc. Summa Cum Laude in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Anath Fischer (Mechanical Engineering, Technion). His research interests lie in the intersection of robotic perception, 3D computer vision, and geometric analysis, usually using 3D point cloud data.

Cristian joined the Centre as PhD researcher under the supervision of Chief Investigator Hongdong Li and Research Fellow Basura Fernando. His research interests are machine learning and pattern recognition focus on the tasks of object detection, scene understanding and occlusion handling. Cristian completed a Bachelor and Computer Engineering degree at Metropolitan Technological University UTEM in Chile, before moving to Australia to complete a Master of Computing (Advanced) with a specialisation in artificial intelligence at the Australian National University, with a Chilean scholarship ‘Becas Chile’. Before Crisitan joined ANU, he also worked as a research assistant and developer in the Web Intelligence Centre in Chile.

Samira started her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018 and is supervised by Chief Investigators Richard Hartley and Stephen Gould. Her current research focuses on human pose estimation and anticipation.

Fred is a PhD student at the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Gould. In 2018, he received his bachelor degree in engineering from the Australian National University and bachelor of science from Beijing Institute of Technology.

Fred has been working on the task of Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection, and is generally interested in vision-based problems and its deep learning solutions.

Sadegh is an Associated PhD researcher at our Australian National University node and a researcher at Smart Vision Systems, Data61, CSIRO. He is working on vision-based action anticipation. His method for action anticipation is particularly crucial in scenarios where one needs to react before the action is finalised, such as to avoid hitting pedestrians with an autonomous car. Currently, he is working on action anticipation in driving scenarios to predict human centric actions (e.g., driver maneuver, violating traffic rules, front car intention, pedestrian intention, and accidents with cars and pedestrians) before they actually begin to happen. Prior to starting his PhD, he was a researcher at NICTA. Before joining NICTA, Sadegh worked in the Computer Vision industry for more than two years. He also has a Bachelor of Science with honors in Computer Software Engineering.

Sadegh is also interested in other computer vision applications such as weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, usage of synthetic data in computer vision, and sequence learning.

Shihao Jiang is a PhD researcher in Australian National University, working under the supervision of Richard Hartley, Dylan Campbell, Miaomiao Liu and Stephen Gould. His research interests include geometric vision, optimization and deep learning. Prior to his PhD, he received his Bachelor of Engineering degree with first class honours in 2016, major in Electronic and Communication Systems.