Events & Talks

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 11-11-2022 Bio-inspired Robotics for Minimal-Invasive Surgery At the BIROMED-Lab, we work on developing novel technology to advance robot-assisted medical interventions. I will provide a short overview on our current research challenges with a focus on robot-assisted, minimally-invasive surgery. Minimal-invasive surgery results in faster patient recovery and using robotic tools allows to further enhance surgery outcome. Such robot-assisted minimal-invasive surgery is typically realized by replacing the direct manual guidance of instruments with telemanipulated or robot-guided instruments. For example, hand tremor can be filtered or the surgeons’ mo... Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 11-11-2022 Digital Biomarkers and Functional Biomechanics in Orthopaedics Developments in assessing joint loading during locomotion and human movement are influenced by fast-pace technological advances. Simple technical solutions for capturing human movement using wearables and cloud-based solutions lead to applications in fields less related to biomechanics. Our group generates clinical evidence for using these technical solutions for assessing relevant parameters in large cohorts, collecting data outside of the laboratory and as digital biomarkers. Moreover, we investigate the functional biomechanics of orthopaedic conditions, evaluate established and novel tre... Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 11-11-2022 Musculoskeletal Function in Immobilization and Rheumatic Disease Immobilization and disease both affect musculoskeletal function. At the same time, functional parameters may be an indicator of disease activity in rheumatic disease and changes in the mechanical environment cause acute and long term adaptation of tissue morphology and function. This presentation will summarize effects of immobilization using bed rest or microgravity on cartilage metabolism as well es introduce experimental setups to assess musculoskeletal function in rheumatic disease. Nataliya Rokhmanova Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Event 10-11-2022 Robot Bionic Intelligence Colloquium University of Stuttgart's Autonomous Systems and Biomedical Systems Research Units together with Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems proudly present three leading researchers in Robot Bionic Intelligence. Please join us for this unique and interesting colloquium.

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 12-10-2022 Understanding the Influence of Moisture on Fingerpad-Surface Interactions This dissertation investigates the influence of moisture on fingerpad-surface interactions from diverse perspectives. First, we examine the extent to which moisture on the finger contributes to the sensation of stickiness during contact with glass. Second, we investigate the representative material properties of a finger at three distinct moisture levels, since the softness of human skin varies significantly with moisture. The third perspective is friction; we examine how the contact conditions, including the moisture of a finger, determine the available friction force opposing lateral slid... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Saekwang Nam

Physical Intelligence Talk 26-09-2022 Ultrafast, Miniature Soft Actuators The quest for an advanced soft robotic actuator technology that is fast and can execute a wide range of application-specific tasks at multiple length scales is still ongoing. Here, we demonstrate a new design and manufacturing strategy that leads to high-speed inflatable actuators exhibiting diverse movements. Our approach leverages the concept of miniaturisation to reduce the required volume of fluid for actuation as well as fibre-reinforcement to improve the efficiency of actuators in converting delivered fluids into fast and predictable movement. To fabricate the designs, we employ a cla... Metin Sitti

Perceiving Systems Talk 22-09-2022 Combine and conquer: representation learning from multiple data distributions It is becoming less and less controversial to say that the days of learning representations through label supervision are over. Recent work discovers that such regimes are not only expensive, but also suffer from various generalisation/robustness issues. This is somewhat unsurprising, as perceptual data (vision, language) are rich and cannot be well represented by a single label --- doing so inevitably result in the model learning spurious features that trivially correlates to the label. In this talk, I will introduce my work during my PhD at Oxford, which looks at representation learning... Yao Feng

Physical Intelligence Talk 22-09-2022 Towards robust and autonomous locomotion in cluttered terrain using insect-scale robots Animals such as mice, cockroaches and spiders have the remarkable ability to maneuver through challenging cluttered natural terrain and have been inspiration for adaptable legged robotic systems. Recent biological research further indicates that body reorientation along pathways of minimal energy is a key factor influencing such locomotion. We propose to extend this idea by hypothesizing that body compliance of soft bodied animals and robots might be an alternate yet effective locomotion strategy to squeeze through cluttered obstacles. We present some early results related to the above usin... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence Talk 20-09-2022 On the tactile perception of friction in humans and robots Humans excel at grasping and manipulating an impressive range of objects of different sizes, shapes, and surface properties. This incredible ability is subserved by a refined tactile perception of friction that informs the central nervous system whether the object is firmly grasped or on the verge of falling. In this talk, I will first dive into how minute lateral displacement enables humans to feel the frictional strength of the contact and how far they are from it in order to adjust their grip force in real time. I will then show how these findings are applied to robotic tactile sensors t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Saekwang Nam

Haptic Intelligence Talk 19-09-2022 Robotic surgical skill evaluation and acquisition Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) has many advantages over open surgery. However, surgeons must be well trained to use the robotic systems to reap the benefits of RAMIS. Many efforts have been invested in optimizing the way RAMIS surgeons acquire technical skills, but the knowledge of how to measure technical skills and optimize training protocols is still limited. The goal of my Ph.D. study is to improve the way surgeons acquire RAMIS skills by (1) developing surgical skill metrics to evaluate the current state of a surgeon; (2) developing and testing novel training protoco... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Guido Caccianiga

Talk 08-09-2022 Computer Vision for Automated Video Editing and Understanding. Video content creation has boomed in recent years. Every day hundreds of thousands of video hours are uploaded to the internet. Thus, video content editing has become more popular and accessible to amateur users. However, current Computer Vision (CV) techniques have not studied technologies to help video editing become a less tedious task. Currently, editors spend hours cutting and stitching videos to deliver final edited videos that convey stories. This cutting process is creative but is often repetitive. With the recent advances in CV, one would expect that a system could learn some cutti... Hongwei Yi

Perceiving Systems Talk 08-09-2022 Computer Vision for Automated Video Editing and Understanding. Video content creation has boomed in recent years. Every day hundreds of thousands of video hours are uploaded to the internet. Thus, video content editing has become more popular and accessible to amateur users. However, current Computer Vision (CV) techniques have not studied technologies to help video editing become a less tedious task. Currently, editors spend hours cutting and stitching videos to deliver final edited videos that convey stories. This cutting process is creative but is often repetitive. With the recent advances in CV, one would expect that a system could learn some cutti... Hongwei Yi

Haptic Intelligence Talk 01-09-2022 Soft Transducers for Human-Machine Interaction Human-machine and human-human virtual interactions have presented a growing area for different kinds of soft transducers including sensors and actuators. However, there are still challenges for soft transducers in their performance. For soft sensors, one key challenge is how to make them super sensitive to external stimuli (pressing, stretching, etc) and small (lightweight and thin). For soft actuators, one key challenge is to drive them with low voltage amplitude and generate high output force. In this talk, I will present my work on electret materials based soft transducers that can serve... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 18-08-2022 Grasping like Humans Do Humans and robots frequently pick up objects. Neuroscientists try to understand how humans control the non-linear musculoskeletal system to do so, and roboticists try to design control to mimic human dexterity. Both groups of scientists tend to decompose grasping based on the characteristics of the hardware, which is clearly separated in a part for positioning the hand/gripper in space and a part for the actual griping. It is therefore generally assumed that mastering these two parts constitutes efficient control of the reach-to-grasp movement. I will argue that human motor control is not f... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ilona Jacobi

Perceiving Systems Talk 04-08-2022 REALY: Rethinking the Evaluation of 3D Face Reconstruction The evaluation of 3D face reconstruction results typically relies on a rigid shape alignment between the estimated 3D model and the ground-truth scan. We observe that aligning two shapes with different reference points can largely affect the evaluation results. This poses difficulties for precisely diagnosing and improving a 3D face reconstruction method. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation approach with a new benchmark REALY, consisting of 100 globally aligned face scans with accurate facial keypoints, high-quality region masks, and topology-consistent meshes. Our approach perform... Yandong Wen

Perceiving Systems Talk 28-07-2022 Implicit Neural Representation for Physics-driven Actuated Soft Bodies Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for actuation signals parameterized by neural networks. Our key contribution is a general and implicit formulation to control active soft bodies by defining a function that enables a continuous mapping from a spatial point in the material space to the actuation value. This property allows us to capture the signal's dominant frequencies, making the method discre... Yao Feng

Perceiving Systems Talk 28-07-2022 Understanding Human Hands in Visual Data Hands are the central means by which humans interact with their surroundings. Understanding human hands help human behavior analysis and facilitate other visual analysis tasks such as action and gesture recognition. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in understanding first-person visual data, and hands are the dominant interaction entities in such activities. Also, there is an explosion of interest in developing computer vision methods for augmented and virtual reality. To deliver an authentic augmented and virtual reality experience, we need to enable humans to interact with the ... Sai Kumar Dwivedi Dimitris Tzionas

Perceiving Systems Talk 27-07-2022 Complete Codec Telepresence Imagine two people, each of them within their own home, being able to communicate and interact virtually with each other as if they are both present in the same shared physical space. Enabling such an experience, i.e., building a telepresence system that is indistinguishable from reality, is one of the goals of Reality Labs Research (RLR) in Pittsburgh. To this end, we develop key technology that combines fundamental computer vision, machine learning, and graphics techniques based on a novel neural reconstruction and rendering paradigm. In this talk, I will cover our advances towards a neur... Yao Feng

Robotic Materials Talk 25-07-2022 ELECTRETS (Dielectrics with quasi-permanent Charges or Dipoles) A long History and a bright Future Electrets have a long history starting more 2600 years ago and a bright future in the areas of soft transducers, plastic electronics, radiation dosimeters, air filters, etc. From the beginning, the similarities, the differences, and the combinations of dielectric and magnetic materials, of positive and negative “electricities”, of internal hetero-charges and external homo-charges, etc. have been puzzling natural philosophers and scientists. At the same time, rather slow, but continuous progress in the understanding and the application of electrets has been made. Recently, the essential role... Christoph Keplinger

Event 22-07-2022 2022 Max Planck Lecture & Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its <br> 2022 Max Planck Lecture and annual scientific summer colloquium. Metin Sitti Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann

Max Planck Lecture 22-07-2022 Skin-Inspired Organic Electronics Zhenan Bao is an inspiring scientist who is a world-renowned chemist, chemical engineer and material scientist and who has received so many awards it becomes challenging to count. She teaches at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley where she and her team develop the most dazzling flexible and stretchable materials, electronics and energy devices which are inspired by human skin. On Friday, July 22, 2022 from 1:30pm, Zhenan Bao will hold this year’s Max Planck Lecture titled "Skin-Inspired Organic Electronics" at the Stuttgart site of the MPI-IS – live and in-person just as bef... Metin Sitti Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann

Learning and Dynamical Systems Talk 14-07-2022 Beyond Conformal Prediction: Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification for Complex Machine Learning Tasks As we begin deploying machine learning models in consequential settings like medical diagnostics or self-driving vehicles, we need ways of knowing when the model may make a consequential error (for example, that the car doesn't hit a human). Michael Muehlebach

Workshop 12-07-2022 Movie Screening "Coded Bias" and Discussion CODED BIAS explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all. Ksenia Keplinger Monika Kotz Oliwia Gust Claudia Daefler

Physical Intelligence Talk 07-07-2022 Soft Materials Innovation for Health and Sustainability Polymers and water are the major components that constitute most living species on the earth, ranging from animals, plants, and fungi to bacteria. Polymers are also pervasive and indispensable in almost every aspect of our daily life, ranging from food, clothing, housing, and healthcare to transportation, communication and entertainment. Furthermore, over 6% of global electricity generated from coal is used to make plastics, and microplastics are already ubiquitous in global biosphere. Intrigued by their ubiquity and impacts, MIT Zhao Lab is focused on the study and development of soft mate...

Event 02-07-2022 2022 Science & Innovation Days Tübingen MPI-IS Tübingen präsentiert Forschungsaktivitäten am 2. Juli 2022: <br> Capture Hall, Robotic Lab, Sensor Finger, Kinderuni-Video Claudia Daefler Georg Martius Huanbo Sun Tsvetelina Alexiadis Claudia Gallatz Felix Grimminger Majid Khadiv

Conference 28-06-2022 - 29-06-2022 IMPRS-IS Prolongation: On-Site Evaluation The IMPRS-IS Ph.D. program is currently undergoing a prolongation process to apply for six more years of funding. This process involves an on-site visit from a team of external evaluators. During this visit, the evaluation committee will visit the two sites of MPI-IS. MPI-IS community members are welcome to join for the event’s scientific talks and poster sessions. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Leila Masri Sara Sorce

Perceiving Systems Talk 13-06-2022 Shape editing, generation, and stylization Manual authoring of 3D content is a laborious and tedious task. In this talk, I present some of 3DL's recent and on-going efforts toward building tools which provide intuitive control for editing, manipulating, and generating 3D shapes. I will discuss how recent advancements, such as joint vision-language embedding spaces can be used to stylize 3D objects, driven by natural language. Finally, I will conclude with ongoing and future work in this direction, as well as other related areas. Omid Taheri

Perceiving Systems Talk 09-06-2022 Learning to create Digital Humans: Generalizable Radiance Fields for Human Performance Rendering In this work, we aim at synthesizing a free-viewpoint video of an arbitrary human performance using sparse multi-view cameras. Recently, several works have addressed this problem by learning person-specific neural radiance fields (NeRF) to capture the appearance of a particular human, In parallel, some work proposed to use pixel-aligned features to generalize radiance fields to arbitrary new scenes and objects. Adopting such generalization approaches to humans, however, is highly challenging due to the heavy occlusions and dynamic articulations of body parts. To tackle this, we propose a no... Yuliang Xiu

Physical Intelligence Talk 31-05-2022 Multifunctional magnetic origami robots Millimeter/centimeter-scale origami robots have recently been explored for biomedical applications due to their inherent shape-morphing capability. However, they mainly rely on passive or/and irreversible deformation that significantly hinders the clinic functions in an on-demand manner. Here, we report magnetically actuated origami robots that can crawl and swim for effective locomotion and targeted drug delivery in severely confined spaces and aqueous environments. We design our robots based on the Kresling origami, whose thin shell structure 1) provides an internal cavity for drug storag... Metin Sitti

Event 05-05-2022 "Warum sind Computer dumm?" Machine Learning und KI-Forscher Bernhard Schölkopf macht mit bei der digitalen Kinder-Uni der Hector Kinderakademien Wann? Donnerstag, den 05. Mai 2022 von 17:00 – 18:00 Uhr Linda Behringer

Perceiving Systems Talk 02-05-2022 Learning to estimate 3D human poses without labeled data Estimating 3D human poses from images or videos is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, the limitation of training data with high-quality 3D pose annotations largely hinder its development and deployment in real applications. In this talk, I will introduce our recent works on training 3D pose estimation models without requiring 3D labeled data. Our first step is to present PoseAug, a new auto-augmentation framework that learns to augment the available training poses towards a greater diversity and thus improve generalization of the trained 2D-to-3D pose estimator. Specifically, P... Michael Black

Perceiving Systems Talk 25-04-2022 Leverage Kinematic and Contact constraints for understanding hand-object interaction My works focus on inferring and understanding the human hand’s interaction with objects from visual inputs, which include several tasks like pose estimation, grasping pose generation, and interacting pose transfer. Unlike the single-body pose estimation task, understanding the Hand-object (multi-bodies) interactions in 3D spaces is more challenging, due to its high degree of articulations, the projection ambiguity, self or mutual occlusions, and the complicated physical constraints. Designing algorithms to tackle these challenges is my goal. We find that the mutual contact can provide rich ... Yuliang Xiu

Perceiving Systems Talk 19-04-2022 Model-based Face Reconstruction and Occlusion Segmentation from Weak Supervision 3D face reconstruction under occlusions is highly challenging because of the large variability of the appearance and location of occluders. Currently, the most successful methods fit a 3D face model through inverse rendering and assume a given segmentation of the occluder to avoid fitting the occluder. However, the segmentation annotations are costly since training an occlusion segmentation model requires large amounts of annotated data. To overcome this, we introduce a model-based approach for 3D face reconstruction that is highly robust to occlusions but does not require any occlusion ann... Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya

Perceiving Systems Talk 12-04-2022 Mixing Synthetic and Real-World Captures for RGB Hand Pose Estimation How can we learn models for hand pose estimation without any (real-world) labels? This talk presents our recent efforts in tackling the challenging scenario of learning from labelled synthetic data and unlabelled real-world data. I will focus on two strategies that we find to be effective: (1) cross-modal consistency and alignment for representation learning and (2) pseudo-label corrections and refinement. The second part of the talk will introduce Assembly101, our newly recorded dataset that tackles 3D hand pose and action understanding over time. Assembly101 is a new procedural activit... Dimitris Tzionas

Physical Intelligence Talk 11-04-2022 Microrobotics to Micro Aerial Vehicles: Robots Interacting with the Environment The Multi-Scale Robotics & Automation Lab (MSRAL) at Purdue University performs cutting-edge research on robotic and automation systems at various length scales: macro-scale (cm to m), meso-scale (~100's of um to a few mm's), and micro-scale (10's of um to 100's of um). All of the developed systems are designed to interact with the environment in unique ways. In this talk, I will discuss some recent MSRAL microrobotics projects on developing learned models for 2D micromanipulation tasks and different types of families of wireless mobile microrobots driven by external magnetic fields that w... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence Talk 07-04-2022 Boundary-Crossing Empathy: The Figuration of the Skin, Bodies, and Boundaries What does it mean to have empathic interactions with robots? What is the role of a body, its surface, and the sense of self for building relations? And how does it change what it means to be human? These could be seen as overarching questions of my PhD project which aims to provide a feminist ethical framework for designing and imagining interactions with robots. I am interested in thinking about the role of binary divides such as human/non-human, self/other or reason/emotion in affective human-robot interaction. I want to look closely at their conceptual and material relations and under... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 07-04-2022 Modeling Humans at Rest with Applications to Robotic Assistance Humans spend a large part of their lives resting. Machine perception of this class of body poses would be beneficial to numerous applications, but it is complicated by line-of-sight occlusion from bedding. Pressure sensing mats are a promising alternative, but data is challenging to collect at scale. To overcome this, we use modern physics engines to simulate bodies resting on a soft bed with a pressure sensing mat. This method can efficiently generate data at scale for training deep neural networks. We present a deep model trained on this data that infers 3D human pose and body shape from ... Dimitris Tzionas Chun-Hao Paul Huang

Perceiving Systems Talk 07-04-2022 Reconstructing Static Scenes and Dynamic Humans with Implicit Neural Representations 3D reconstruction is a long-standing problem in computer vision and has a variety of applications such as virtual reality, 3D content generation, and telepresence. In this talk, I will present our progress on 3D reconstruction of static scenes and dynamic humans with implicit neural representations. The first part of the talk introduces an effective regularization when optimizing implicit neural representations on indoor scenes based on the Manhattan-world Assumption. In the second part, I will show some animatable implicit neural representations for modeling dynamic humans from videos. Hongwei Yi

Haptic Intelligence Talk 05-04-2022 Mechanical Design, Development and Testing of Bioinspired Legged Robots for Dynamic Locomotion Animals like ostriches perform complex locomotion tasks in the presence of large neurocontrol delays and potentially with limited central command. It is surprising that legged robots with high control frequencies and microsecond-range control delays are still unable to compete with legged animals in terms of agility, robustness, performance, and energy efficiency. These observations led us to look closely at animals to draw inspiration and improve robotic leg designs. For example, we observed that certain leg joints moved in a coordinated manner but without neural command when manually flex... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 18-03-2022 Assessment and Enhancement of Proprioceptive Performance In daily living activities, proprioception – information about limbs’ position and movement and the force that they applied - is fundamental to respond to the environment and rapidly react to changing circumstances. For example, it allows us to maneuver and find our way around obstacles in the dark and manipulate objects out of view, preventing their slippage. Many neurological conditions and traumatic events affect motor and somatosensory functions. Reliable methods to quantify proprioceptive deficits are crucial for better understanding the pathophysiology of disability, enhancing the det... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 17-03-2022 Multidimensional Tunable Mechanics Using Jamming Jamming is a structural phenomenon that provides tunable mechanical behavior. A jamming structure typically consists of a collection of elements with low effective stiffness and damping. When a pressure gradient, such as vacuum, is applied, kinematic and frictional coupling increase, resulting in dramatically altered mechanical properties. This results in a number of functional capabilities useful for robotics applications including: tunable stiffness, tunable force threshold, tunable dynamic response, reversible plasticity, shape locking, and variable kinematics. Engineers have used jammin... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 14-03-2022 On the Role of Tactile Perception for the Representation of Motion and Space: Modeling and Applications to Advanced Human-Machine Interaction It is well known from the literature that cutaneous touch plays a crucial role in the perception of physical properties of the objects (e.g. shape, texture). However, the tactile mechanoreceptors are also important in building a perceptual representation of space and motion and in guiding and controlling human movements. Unveiling and mathematically modelling the components underpinning these phenomena is important not only to shed light on the neuroscientific mechanisms of the human somatosensory system but also to design artificial devices and experimental protocols for advanced human-mac... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Max Planck Lecture 10-03-2022 Understanding and tuning the surface chemistry of perovskite oxides to activate oxygen exchange and water splitting reactions The deployment of decarbonization technologies, including solid oxide fuel and electrolysis cells, is limited by slow rates of conversion reactions at surfaces, and instability of materials under operating conditions. A major scientific challenge has been the lack of knowledge of the chemistry and electronic structure on material surfaces in the harsh operational conditions.

Perceiving Systems Talk 08-02-2022 Structure-aware Narrative Understanding and Summarization In this work, we analyze and summarize full-length movies from multimodal input (i.e., video, text, audio). We first hypothesize that identifying the narrative structure of movies is a precondition for summarizing them. According to screenwriting theory, turning points (e.g., change of plans, major setback, climax) are crucial narrative moments within a movie that define the narrative structure and determine its progression and thematic units. Therefore, we introduce the task of Turning Point (TP) identification and leverage it for movie summarization and trailer generation. Next, we propos... Nikos Athanasiou Chun-Hao Paul Huang

Perceiving Systems Talk 18-01-2022 Unified Simulation, Perception, and Generation of Human Behavior Understanding and modeling human behavior is fundamental to almost any computer vision and robotics applications that involve humans. In this talk, I will present a holistic approach to human behavior modeling and tackle its three essential aspects --- simulation, perception, and generation. I will show how the three aspects are deeply connected and how utilizing and improving one aspect can greatly benefit the other aspects. Since humans live in a physical world, we treat simulation as the foundation of our approach and start by developing a fundamental framework for representing human ... Hongwei Yi

Conference 12-01-2022 - 13-01-2022 Scientific Symposium All current and former employees and friends of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Cyber Valley are welcome to attend this event. If you have any questions, please contact Cyber Valley Research Coordinator - Florian Mayer (florian.mayer@cyber-valley.de) Bernhard Schölkopf Metin Sitti Michael Black Moritz Hardt Christoph Keplinger Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Matthias Tröndle Florian Mayer

Perceiving Systems Talk 14-12-2021 Discrete inverse spectral geometry for shape analysis Spectral quantities as the eigenvalues of the Laplacian operator are widely used in geometry processing since they provide a very informative summary of the intrinsic geometry of deformable shapes. Typically, the intrinsic properties of shapes are computed from their representation in 3D space and are used to encode compact geometric features, thus adopting a data-reduction principle. On the contrary, this talk focuses on the inverse problem: namely, recovering an extrinsic embedding from a purely intrinsic encoding, like in the classical “hearing the shape of the drum” problem. I will sta... Silvia Zuffi

Perceiving Systems Talk 10-12-2021 Next Generation Lifelike Avatar Creation High-fidelity avatar creation for films and games is tied with complex capture equipment, massive data, a long production cycle, and intensive manual labor by a production team. And it may still be in the notorious Uncanny Valley. In this talk, we will explore how to produce a lifelike avatar in a low-cost way. We will show how to leverage deep learning networks to accelerate and simplify the industrial avatar production procedure from data capturing to animation. And bring photorealism to the next level! Timo Bolkart

Haptic Intelligence Talk 07-12-2021 Trimanipulation: Virtual reality training platform Supernumerary robotic limbs could significantly impact human capabilities, offering people to achieve actions that are not possible with only two natural hands. However, as three-hand control is not typical in everyday activities, it is currently unknown how to train people to acquire this "super" capability. In this talk, I will present a virtual reality trimanual platform that I developed during my master's thesis. This system offers to control three virtual hands separately or together in three degrees of freedom. The dominant foot served as the additional source of motor commands for t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 25-11-2021 Vibrotactile Patterns for Haptic Surfaces I will explore several rendering solutions for providing rich haptic feedback on surfaces. The main topics will be potential physical barriers to propagation of vibrations in the tactile range, rendering of real-life haptic interactions such as virtual musical instruments, and the potential use of haptic illusions for navigation aids. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

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