About

I suppose it is about time to update my old web page and put on it all kinds of stuff that happened since I last touched HTML code 6 years ago. So, anyway, it has been 7 years since I received the little yellow slip of paper indicating that all requirements set forth by MIT for granting me a degree of Doctor of Philosophy (I still had to look up how to spell it) have been satisfied and I am now free to pursue my other interests. It was another way of saying that they will no longer pay my tuition and would I be so kind to get the hell out of the office provided to me by the MIT corporation.


Recent Projects

Ambient Intelligence

A large undertaking with Chris Wren at MERL. The project is based on the idea that general rough context of the human environment can be glipmsed from a large array of low fidelity sensors. This context can provide a set of powerful cues about human behavior, be it an individual, or a large organization. This project has deep implications for social studies, security and building management applications. And is just an interesting thought that went way too far. I am glad that Chris and I managed to stick with it for this long - it got quite a bit of academic attention.

<more to come>


Old Projects

Category learning with weakly labeled data 

This was the topic of my dissertation. This idea develops some esoteric but practical aspects of machine learning that explain the process of long-term category forming.

alpha wolf

This is Bill Tomlinson's baby, to which a few of us contributed. At this time some of my on-line audio learning code got into this system but most of my time was really taken with writing my dissertation. Bill was fascinated with the development of social structure in a pack of wolves and built this system to try to mimic it in a realistic way. I love the visuals, due to Marc Downie and Adolph Wong's fascinating animations.

Duncan:Trial By Eire

This was the first project that I worked on withe the (void *) crew headed by Bruce Blumberg. The project is devoted to trying to understand high level learning processes that take place during animal training. Domesticating of animals has been going on for thousands of years and animal trainers have picked up some tricks along the way that work pretty much as seen on TV. We were curious about what it would take to build machines that can be trained to be as obedient as dogs without involving linguistics, speech and gesture recognition. It clearly can be done in principle, since dogs do not follow the language development paths of humans, yet are perfectly capable of responding to simple voice commands. This project approached the problem of learning grounded speech using actions as labels for "what matters" to an animal about human speech. Scientific American Frontiers had a nice episode about it.

Kids Room

KidsRoom was a one-of-a-kind application of computer vision for a physically situated  computer game. It took a few grad students from Aaron Bobick's group (back when he was at MIT) about 6 weeks to build and was only shown publicly twice. However, its distant cousin, "KidsRoom 2", was re-made commercially by a local company "NearLife" and was exhibited for a few months in the London Millenium Dome in 2000. Here are some videos kindly digitized by Claudio Pinhanez with my comments.

Contact

Send me mail at yivanov at gmail.com.