Abstract: The most natural way for an artificial agent to communicate with a human is through language. Language allows an agent to convey what it is seeing, what its internal goals are, ask questions about concepts that it is uncertain about, and possibly engage in a conversation. Similarly, a human can use language to teach an agent new concepts, describe instructions for tasks that the agent should perform, and possibly give feedback to the agent by describing its mistakes. In this talk, I will describe our recent work in this domain.

Bio: Sanja Fidler is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. She joined UofT in 2014. In 2018, she took a role of Director of AI at NVIDIA, leading a research lab in Toronto. Previously she was a Research Assistant Professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located in the campus of the University of Chicago. She completed her PhD in computer science at University of Ljubljana in 2010, and was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto during 2011-2012. In 2010 she visited UC Berkeley as a visiting research scientist. She has served as a Program Chair of the 3DV conference, and as an Area Chair of CVPR, ICCV, EMNLP, ICLR, NIPS, and AAAI, and will serve as Program Chair of ICCV'21. She received the NVIDIA Pioneer of AI award, Amazon Academic Research Award, Facebook Faculty Award, and the Connaught New Researcher Award. In 2018 she was appointed as the Canadian CIFAR AI Chair. She has also been ranked among the top 3 most influential AI female researchers in Canada by Re-WORK. Her work on semi-automatic object instance annotation won the Best Paper Honorable Mention at CVPR’17. Her main research interests are scene parsing from images and videos, interactive annotation, 3D scene understanding, 3D content creation, and multimodal representations.

Speaker: 
Sanja Fidler, University of Toronto / NVIDIA
Time/Date: 
Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - 10:30
Location: 
CSE 305
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