Honored to have been asked to moderate a panel of ML@GT researchers who stepped up to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. See the video of the panel below. The coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world, spurring researchers across disciplines into action to help human-kind. Four researchers affiliated with the Machine Learning Center at […]
We present Decentralized Distributed Proximal Policy Optimization (DD-PPO), a method for distributed reinforcement learning in resource-intensive simulated environments. DD-PPO is distributed (uses multiple machines), decentralized (lacks a centralized server), and synchronous (no computation is ever ‘stale’), making it conceptually simple and easy to implement.
Abstract We propose 4 insights that help to significantly improve the performance of deep learning models that predict surface normals and semantic labels from a single RGB image. These insights are: (1) denoise the ”ground truth” surface normals in the training set to ensure consistency with the semantic labels; (2) concurrently train on a mix […]
It was great to host Jeff Dean during his recent visit to Georgia Tech It’s not every day that Google’s head of artificial intelligence visits Georgia Tech, but when he does he makes an impact. Hosted by the College of Computing and the Machine Learning Center (ML@GT), Jeff Dean, senior fellow and senior vice president […]
Abstract To help bridge the gap between internet vision-style problems and the goal of vision for embodied perception we instantiate a large-scale navigation task – Embodied Question Answering in photo-realistic environments (Matterport 3D). We thoroughly study navigation policies that utilize 3D point clouds, RGB images, or their combination. Our analysis of these models reveals several […]
Abstract We introduce the task of scene-aware dialog. Our goal is to generate a complete and natural response to a question about a scene, given video and audio of the scene and the history of previous turns in the dialog. To answer successfully, agents must ground concepts from the question in the video while leveraging […]
A nice write-up in Georgia Tech’s Research Horizons Magazine about ML@GT Machine learning has been around for decades, but the advent of big data and more powerful computers has increased its impact significantly — moving machine learning beyond pattern recognition and natural language processing into a broad array of scientific disciplines. A subcategory of artificial intelligence, […]
A TEDx talk that I recently did. In this talk, the speaker takes you on a journey of how AI systems have evolved over time. DIRECTOR OF MACHINE LEARNING AT GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Dr. Irfan Essa is a professor in the school of Interactive Computing and the inaugural Director of Machine Learning at Georgia […]
Paper Abstract Purpose: Basic surgical skills of suturing and knot tying are an essential part of medical training. Having an automated system for surgical skills assessment could help save experts time and improve training efficiency. There have been some recent attempts at automated surgical skills assessment using either video analysis or acceleration data. In this […]
Paper U. Ahsan, M. D. Choudhury, and Irfan Essa (2017), “Towards Using Visual Attributes to Infer Image Sentiment Of Social Events,” in Proceedings of The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Anchorage, Alaska, US, 2017. [PDF] [BIBTEX] @InProceedings{ 2017-Ahsan-TUVAIISSE, address = {Anchorage, Alaska, US}, author = {Unaiza Ahsan and Munmun De Choudhury and Irfan Essa}, […]