VCLA

Milestones

  1. Sep. 2020: Congratulations to Zhenliang Zhang, Yixin Zhu et al, their paper "Graph-based Hierarchical Knowledge Representation for Robot Task Transfer from Virtual to Physical World" has been selected as a finalist for the 2020 IROS Best Paper Award. [link]
  2. July 2020: Qing Li et al received the "Best Paper Award in ICML2020 Workshops on Bridge Between Perception and Reasoning: Graph Neural Networks & Beyond" for their paper "Closed Loop Neural-Symbolic Learning via Integrating Neural Perception, Grammar Parsing, and Symbolic Reasoning".
  3. June 2020: Mitchell Hill defended his dissertation " Learning and Mapping Energy Functions of High-Dimensional Image Data" and joined Univ. of Central Florida as a junior faculty.
  4. June 2019: We hosted CVPR2019 --- a premier conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition at Long Beach Convention Center, with 9,000+ registered attendees from 68 countries and 180+ companies as exhibitors. [link]
  5. May 2019: Wenguan Wang received the "ACM China Doctoral Dissertation Award 2018". Xu Xie et al received the "ACM TURC Best Paper Award" for their work on VRGym. [img, img, img]
  6. April 2018: Prof. Song-Chun Zhu, together with Prof. Jason Cong at UCLA, are part of a 8-university team winning a new Center on Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP) in an effort to remove the “memory wall” between memories that store data and processors that operate on that data — a bottleneck in the Von Neumann architecture since 1945. [link], [link]
  7. January 2018: Dr. Tao Gao joined VCLA@UCLA as an assistant Professor of Statistics and Communications Studies. Professor Gao received his Ph.D from Yale in Psychology and was a Postdoc in Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT before joining UCLA.
  8. August 2017: VCLA hosted annual meeting for the MURI project on visual commonsense reasoning, researchers from the US (CMU, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, UIUC, Yale) and UK (Birmingham, Glasgow, Oxford, Reading) presented progresses on various aspects, and discussed new paradigm shifting directions to advance research in vision, cognition, learning, and robotics. [link]
  9. August 2017: Tianmin Shu, Lifeng Fan et al received the “Computational Modeling Prize” awarded by the Cognitive Science Society, for their work on modeling human social interactions. Their method learns non-parametric potential functions from aerial videos, and derives various social fields and forces, as in physics, to explicitly explain human social activities.
  10. June 2017: Four VCLA members successfully defended their Ph.D dissertations: Weixin Li, Xiaohan Nie, Yang Lu and Chengcheng Yu.
  11. May 2017: A team led by Dr. Song-Chun Zhu received the 2017 XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence) grant from DARPA I2O for the project "Learning and Communicating Explainable Representations for Analytics and Autonomy", grant# N66001-17-2-4029.
  12. June 2016: A team led by Dr. Song-Chun Zhu won the bid for hosting CVPR 2019 at Long Beach, California --a coastal city in the Los Angeles area close to the Silicon Beach and UCLA. [link]
  13. June 2016: Dr. Tianfu Wu has accepted a tenure track position at North Carolina State University, and will join the ECE dept as an assistant professor.
  14. June 2016: Three VCLA members received their Ph.D degrees: Amy Fire, Seyoung Park and Dan Xie.
  15. Jan 2016: VCLA released the viz2016.com website to the public for tracking presidential elections, thank to Weixin Li and Tao Yuan.
  16. Sep 2015: Postdoc Dr. Xiaobai Liu joined the Department of Computer Science at San Diego State University as a tenure track assistant professor.
  17. Sep 2015: Postdoc Dr. Caiming Xiong joined MetaMind as a senior research scientist.
  18. June 2015: A team led by Dr. Song-Chun Zhu received the 2015 DoD MURI (Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative) grant for a project entitled "Understanding Scenes and Events through Joint Parsing, Cognitive Reasoning and Lifelong Learning".
  19. June 2015: A team led by Dr. Song-Chun Zhu received the 2015 DARPA SIMPLEX grant for a project entitled "Learning Homogeneous Representation from Heterogeneous Data for Quanti. and Quali. Reasoning in Autonomy".
  20. April 2015: Ph.D student Jungseock Joo accepted a tenure track offer from Dept. of Communications Studies, UCLA.
  21. July 2014: Dr. Tianfu Wu is promoted to Research Assistant Professor at Department of Statistics, UCLA.
  22. December 2013: Dr. Song-Chun Zhu received Helmholtz Test-of-Time Award, ICCV 2013.

Press Coverage

  1. A Robot That Explains Its Actions Is a First Step Towards AI We Can (Maybe) Trust by Evan Ackerman. IEEE Spectrum. Dec 19, 2019.
  2. In Robots We Trust? UCLA Study Shows Way Forward by UCLA Samueli Newsroom. UCLA Samueli. Dec 19, 2019.
  3. Robot experiment shows people trust robots more when robots explain what they are doing by Bob Yirka. Tech Xplore. Dec 19, 2019.
  4. Need a hand with that? by Ian Connellan. Cosmos Magazine. Dec 19, 2019.
  5. VRKitchen: An interactive virtual environment to train and test AI agents by Ingrid Fadelli. Tech Xplore. March 27, 2019.
  6. Robots taught to work alongside humans by giving high fives by Matt Reynolds. New Scientist. April 27, 2017. [Video Demo]
  7. Give a Robot a Fish by Simon Zou. The Daily Bruin’s Prime Magazine. May 23, 2016.
  8. UCLA Researchers Use Newsscape Archive to Analyze Human Communication by Jorge Valero. Daily Bruin. Feb 04, 2016.
  9. Visual Persuasion: Inferring Communicative Intents of Images

    10. - Is a Picture Worth 1,000 Polls by Virginia Postrel. Bloomberg View. June 25, 2014.
  10. I2T: Image Parsing to Text Generation

    11. - Surveillance Software Knows What a Camera Sees by Tom Simonite. MIT Technology Review. June 1, 2010.