PGRs meeting and Research Presentations – April 2016

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 13th April, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

 

PGRs Monthly meeting_April2016  (Slides )

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Agenda

  • Speaker –>
  • A quick look at the new “PGRs Management System”,PGR-MS1

PGR-MS2

  • PGRs Blog.

PGR-Blog

  • Discussion of the activities plan.
  • Update and plan for the “Showcase Event”
  • Announcements, AOB, & closing

 

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Title: Life-long Spatio-temporal Exploration of Dynamic Environments: An overview.

By: Joao Santos

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 Abstract: The primary purpose of robotic exploration is to autonomously acquire a complete and precise model of the robot’s operational environment. To explore efficiently, the robot has to direct its attention to environment areas that are currently unknown. If the world was static, these areas would simply correspond to previously unvisited locations. In the case of dynamic environments, visiting all locations only once is not enough, because they may change over time. Thus, dynamic exploration requires that the environment locations are revisited and their (re-) observations are used to update a dynamic environment model. However, revisiting the individual locations with the same frequency and on a regular basis is not efficient because the environment dynamics will, in general, not be homegeneous, (i.e. certain areas change more often and the changes occur only at certain times).

Similarly to the static environment exploration, the robot should revisit only the areas whose states are unknown at the time of the planned visits. Thus, the robot has to use its environment model to predict the uncertainty of the individual locations over time and use these predictions to plan observations that from a theoretical point of view improve its knowledge about the world’s dynamics. Hence, the observations are scheduled in order to obtain information about the environment changes, which are mainly caused by human-activity. As a consequence, using schedules motivated by the changes in metric maps increases the chance to extract  dynamics that are essential for object learning and activity recording tasks.

 

 

 

 

 

Research Showcase for Postgraduates

Postgraduates by Research (PGRs) presented and showed their research work in the Annual Showcase Event for the School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln. (14th and 15th May). The event spread over all the day on Wed 14th May and featured in the morning of Thursday 15th May, with visitors and companies representatives.

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The event was opened by the Head of School and concluded with handing prizes for the Best Presentation, Best Poster and Best Demo.

 

 

Amjad Altadmri – PhD

Amjad Altadmri has passed his PhD viva, subject to minor amendments, earlier today.

Thesis Title:  “Semantic Video Annotation in Domain-Independent Videos Utilising Similarity and Commonsense Knowledgebases

Thanks to the external, Dr John Wood from the University of Essex, the internal Dr Bashir Al-Diri and the viva chair, Dr Kun Guo.

Congratulations and Well done.

All colleagues are invited to join Amjad on celebrating his achievement, tomorrow (Thursday 28th Feb) at 12:00noon, in our meeting room MC3108, with some drinks and light refreshments available.

Best wishes.

 

February PGR Research Presentations

The PGRs Research Presentations series has started on Wed. 13th Feb, 1pm, Meeting Room, MC3108 (3rd floor).

In each session we expect two PGR presentations. This session we had the following presentations:

 

Title: “A probabilistic approach   to Correctly and Automatically form of Retinal Vasculature“.

Title:   “Semantic Video Analysis: from Camera Language to Human Language

By: Touseef Qureshi

By: Amjad Altadmri

Abstract: 

Correct configuration and formation of   retinal vasculature is a vital step towards the diagnoses of these   cardiovascular diseases. A single minor mistake during the process of   connecting broken segments of vessels can lead to a completely incorrect   vasculature. Image processing techniques can’t alone solve this problem. On   the other hand, we are working on multidimensional scientific approach that   integrates Artificial intelligence, image process techniques, statistics and   probability. We are working and expecting an optimal approach towards the   correct configuration of broken vessels segments at junctions, bridges, and   terminals.

Abstract 

The   rapidly increasing volume of visual data, available online or via   broadcasting, emphasizes the need towards building intelligent tools for   indexing, searching, rating, and retrieval. Textual semantic representations,   such as tagging, labeling and annotation, are often important parts of   videos’ indexing process, due to the advances in text analysis and their   intuitive user-friendly nature for representing semantics suitable for search   and retrieval.

 

Ideally,   this annotation should simulate the human cognitive way of perceiving and   describing videos. While these digital video mediums contain low-level visual   data, human beings have the ability to infer more meaningful information from   videos. The difference between these low-level contents and its corresponding   human perception is referred to as the “semantic gap”. This gap is even   harder to be handled in domain-independent uncontrolled videos, mainly due to   the lack of any previous information about the analyzed video on one side,   and the huge generic knowledge needed to be available on the other.