March 27, 2017 / Last updated : January 5, 2020 irfan Computational Journalism

Paper in IEEE WACV (2017): "Complex Event Recognition from Images with Few Training Examples"

Paper Abstract We propose to leverage concept-level representations for complex event recognition in photographs given limited training examples. We introduce a novel framework to discover event concept attributes from the web and use that to extract semantic features from images and classify them into social event categories with few training examples. Discovered concepts include a variety of objects, scenes, […]
March 1, 2017 / Last updated : March 1, 2017 irfan Machine Learning

Presentation at the Machine Learning Center at GA Tech on "The New Machine Learning Center at GA Tech: Plans and Aspirations"

Machine Learning at Georgia Tech Seminar Series Speaker: Irfan Essa Date/Time: March 1, 2017, 12n Abstract The Interdisciplinary Research Center (IRC) for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) was established in Summer 2016 to foster research and academic activities in and around the discipline of Machine Learning. This center aims to create a community that […]
October 21, 2016 / Last updated : January 6, 2020 irfan Awards

Paper in M2CAI (MICCAI workshop) on “Fine-tuning Deep Architectures for Surgical Tool Detection and results of Tool Detection Challange”

Paper A. Zia, D. Castro, and I. Essa (2016), “Fine-tuning Deep Architectures for Surgical Tool Detection,” in Workshop and Challenges on Modeling and Monitoring of Computer Assisted Interventions (M2CAI), Held in Conjunction with International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), Athens, Greece, 2016. [PDF] [WEBSITE] [BIBTEX] @InProceedings{ 2016-Zia-FDASTD, address = {Athens, […]
October 18, 2016 / Last updated : January 5, 2020 irfan Computational Photography and Video

Paper (ACM MM 2016) “Leveraging Contextual Cues for Generating Basketball Highlights”

Paper Abstract The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly use audio-visual cues derived from the video, we propose an approach that additionally leverages contextual cues […]
October 6, 2016 / Last updated : January 5, 2020 irfan Machine Learning

Announcing the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT)

Announcement from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing about a new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning (ML@GT) that I will be serving as the Inaugural Director for. Machine Learning @ Georgia Tech Based in the College of Computing, ML@GT represents all of Georgia Tech. It is tasked with pushing forward the ability for computers to […]
September 2, 2016 / Last updated : January 5, 2020 irfan Activity Recognition

Paper in IJCARS (2016) on “Automated video-based assessment of surgical skills for training and evaluation in medical schools”

Paper Abstract Purpose: Routine evaluation of basic surgical skills in medical schools requires considerable time and effort from supervising faculty. For each surgical trainee, a supervisor has to observe the trainees in- person. Alternatively, supervisors may use training videos, which reduces some of the logistical overhead. All these approaches, however, are still incredibly time consuming […]
March 7, 2016 / Last updated : January 5, 2020 irfan Computational Photography and Video

Paper (WACV 2016) "Discovering Picturesque Highlights from Egocentric Vacation Videos"

Paper Abstract We present an approach for identifying picturesque highlights from large amounts of egocentric video data. Given a set of egocentric videos captured over the course of a vacation, our method analyzes the videos and looks for images that have good picturesque and artistic properties. We introduce novel techniques to automatically determine aesthetic features […]