Prof. Cordelia Schmid

“Automatic Understanding of the Visual World”

 Monday March 1, 2021 – 3:15 – 4:15 (CET)


Cordelia

Automatic Understanding of the Visual World

One of the central problems of artificial intelligence is machine
perception, i.e., the ability to understand the visual world based on
input from sensors such as cameras.

In this talk, I will present recent progress of my team in this direction. I will start with presenting results on how to generate additional training data using weak annotations and synthetic data. Next, I discuss our results for action recognition in videos. Our approach moves away from state-of-the-art frame based approaches and improves classification and localization by relying on joint information from humans and objects over time. Such a model can also be adapted to behavior prediction for self-driving cars. Finally, I will present recent work on grasping with a robot arm based on learning long-horizon manipulations with a hierarchy of RL and imitation-based skills.

Cordelia Schmid holds a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and a Doctorate, also in Computer Science, from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG). Her doctoral thesis received the best thesis award from INPG in 1996. Dr. Schmid was a post-doctoral research assistant in the Robotics Research Group of Oxford University in 1996–1997.

Since 1997 she has held a permanent research position at Inria, where she is a research director. Dr. Schmid has been an Associate Editor for IEEE PAMI (2001–2005) and for IJCV (2004–2012), editor-in-chief for IJCV (2013–2018), a program chair of IEEE CVPR 2005 and ECCV 2012 as well as a general chair of IEEE CVPR 2015, ECCV 2020 and ICCV 2023.

In 2006, 2014 and 2016, she was awarded the Longuet-Higgins prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision that have withstood the test of time. She is a fellow of IEEE. She was awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2013, theHumbolt research award in 2015 and the Inria & French Academy of Science Grand Prix in 2016. She was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, in 2017. In 2018 she received the Koenderink prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision that have withstood the test of time. She was awarded the Royal Society Milner award in 2020. Starting 2018 she holds a joint appointment with Google research.