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Understanding the Visual World through Code
by Professor Jiajun Wu
Date: Friday, Nov. 5
Time: 17:30
Location: Online Call via Zoom

Our guest speaker is Jiajun Wu from Stanford University and you are all cordially invited to the CVG Seminar on Nov 5th at 5:30 p.m. on Zoom (passcode is 769629).

Abstract

Much of our visual world is highly regular: objects are often symmetric and have repetitive parts; indoor scenes such as corridors often consist of objects organized in a repetitive layout. How can we infer and represent such regular structures from raw visual data, and later exploit them for better scene recognition, synthesis, and editing? In this talk, I will present our recent work on developing neuro-symbolic methods for scene understanding. Here, symbolic programs and neural nets play complementary roles: symbolic programs are more data-efficient to train and generalize better to new scenarios, as they robustly capture high-level structure; deep nets effectively extract complex, low-level patterns from cluttered visual data. I will demonstrate the power of such hybrid models in three different domains: 2D image editing, 3D shape modeling, and human motion understanding.

Bio

Jiajun Wu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, working on computer vision, machine learning, and computational cognitive science. Before joining Stanford, he was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wu's research has been recognized through the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award, the MIT George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making, the 2020 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year, the IROS Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics, and faculty research awards and graduate fellowships from Samsung, Amazon, Facebook, Nvidia, and Adobe.