- This event has passed.
Dr. Igor Gilitschenski (University of Toronto) : “The Shape of Things to Come”
Speaker: Dr. Igor Gilitschenski (University of Toronto)
Title: The Shape of Things to Come
Video: Click here to view
Abstract: Recent advances in robotics leverage visual and video foundation models. Many such models were trained on existing large-scale data obtained from the internet. As a consequence, it is often necessary to assume images as the primary sensing modality and language as the main interface. Traditional robot deployment, in contrast, employs a wide and growing variety of sensors. Existing robotics and simulation systems also offer numerous different affordances for interaction. This talk examines the dichotomy between existing large models and the needs in robotic systems. Using our recent work on event-camera vision and 3D scene control as examples, we aim to elucidate some of the challenges in current perception and generation techniques.
Bio: Igor Gilitschenski is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he leads the Toronto Intelligent Systems Lab. He is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute. Previously, he was a (visiting) Research Scientist at the Toyota Research Institute. He was also a Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL). There, he was the technical lead of DRL’s autonomous driving research team. Dr. Gilitschenski joined MIT from the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, where he worked on robotic perception. He obtained his doctorate in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Stuttgart. His current research interests focus on leveraging large models to build and manipulate efficient scene representations and to use these representations for robot learning. He is the recipient of several best paper awards, including at the American Control Conference, the International Conference of Information Fusion, and the Robotics and Automation Letters.
