Episode 51: Research and Tooling for Computer Vision Systems with Jason Corso

Published: Jan. 8, 2021, noon

Show Notes

  • (2:13) Jason went over his experience studying Computer Science at Loyola College in Baltimore for undergraduate, where he got an early exposure to academic research in image registration.
  • (4:31) Jason described his graduate school experience at John Hopkins University, where he completed his Ph.D. on “Techniques for Vision-Based Human-Computer Interaction” that proposed the Visual Interaction Cues paradigm.
  • (9:31) During his time as a Post-Doc Fellow at UCLA, Jason helped develop automatic segmentation and recognition techniques for brain tumors to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment accuracy
  • (14:27) From 2007 to 2014, Jason was a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at SUNY-Buffalo. He covered the content of two graduate-level courses on Bayesian Vision and Intro to Pattern Recognition that he taught.
  • (18:20) On the topic of metric learning, Jason proposed an approach to data analysis and modeling for computer vision called "Active Clustering."
  • (21:35) On the topic of image understanding, Jason created Generalized Image Understanding - a project that examined a unified methodology that integrates low-, mid-, and high-level elements for visual inference (equivalent to image captioning today).
  • (24:51) On the topic of video understanding, Jason worked on ISTARE: Intelligent Spatio-Temporal Activity Reasoning Engine, whose objective is to represent, learn, recognize, and reason over activities in persistent surveillance videos.
  • (27:46) Jason dissected Action Bank - a high-level representation of activity in video, which comprises of many individual action detectors sampled broadly in semantic space and viewpoint space.
  • (35:30) Jason unpacked LIBSVX - a library of super voxel and video segmentation methods coupled with a principled evaluation benchmark based on quantitative 3D criteria for good super voxels.
  • (40:06) Jason gave an overview of AI research activities at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2014 to 2020.
  • (41:09) Jason covered the problems and projects in his graduate-level courses on Foundations of Computer Vision and Advanced Topics in Computer Vision at Michigan.
  • (44:56) Jason went over his recent research on video captioning and video description.
  • (47:03) Jason described his exciting software called BubbleNets, which chooses the best video frame for a human to annotate.
  • (51:44) Jason shared anecdotes of Voxel51's inception and key takeaways that he has learned.
  • (01:05:25) Jason talked about Voxel51's Physical Distancing Index that tracks the coronavirus global pandemic's impact on social behavior.
  • (01:07:47) Jason discussed his exciting new chapter as the new director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
  • (01:11:28) Jason identified the differences and similarities between being a professor and being a founder.
  • (01:14:55) Jason gave his advice to individuals who want to make a dent in AI research.
  • (01:16:14) Jason mentioned the trends in computer vision research that he is most excited about at the moment.
  • (01:17:23) Closing segment.

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