Graduate School of Informatics

Graduate School of Informatics /Multimedia Informatics

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Nevzat Göksan Güner will defend his thesis.

Title: PROCEDURAL ROAD NETWORK MODEL GENERATION

Date: 12th January 2018

Time: 10:30 AM

Place: A-212

Thesis Abstract : Modeling high scaled road networks with many intersections and distant streets takes a serious amount of 3D modelers’ time. The amount of work 3D modelers need can be reduced by generating the basic model procedurally; therefore, 3D modelers spend more time to work on the details. In this thesis, we focus on procedurally generating low detailed and lightweight 3D road network models with dynamic lanes and lines. Our system also has the same basic abilities with the traditional road network modeling tools capable of creating junctions and pavements. In order to make a better performing 3D model, we use straight and arc road segments consisted of minimum amount of polygons. The main focus of this thesis will be creating a 3D procedural road network generation system with decreased polygon and texture costs.

Interview information for the applications of Health Informatics Department Medical Informatics PhD and MSc 2017-2018 Spring Semester

Interviews will be held on 10 January 2018 Wednesday

Invited applicants have to be ready in front of Conference Hall-2 in Informatics Instute at the specified date

PhD Program

Interview Date : 10 January 2018 09:30 - 12:30

MSc Program

Interview Date : 10 January 2018 13:30 - 16:30

Interview information for the applications of Health Informatics Department Bioninformatics MSc Program 2017-2018 Spring Semester

Interviews will be held on 9 January 2018 Tuesday

Invited applicants have to be ready in front of Conference Hall-2 in Informatics Instute at the specified date

Interview Date: 9 January 2018 13:30 - 17:00

Dr. Oya Çeliktutan (Imperial College London) is going to give a seminar titled "Human Behaviour Analysis in Interactions with Virtual Agents and Robots" for Multimedia Informatics - Multimedia Standards (MMI 726) course. You are all kindly invited.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: January 5, 2018, 13:30-14:30

Title: Human Behaviour Analysis in Interactions with Virtual Agents and Robots

Abstract:

Socially intelligent agents and robots are soon to be a fact of everyday life due to the rapid growth in the fields of affective computing, human-machine interaction and social robotics. Numerous innovative applications in healthcare, education and entertainment motivate the development of ever more sophisticated machines that are capable of interpreting human behaviours and adapting to user’s profile, namely, personality, preferences and needs. To realise this vision, one of the prominent research problems is automatic personality analysis. Personality is key in communication: people observe others and form impressions regarding their personalities, and adapt their own behaviours to maintain others’ engagement during social interactions. Doing so is a natural routine for humans. In this talk, I will show how this mechanism can be automated for human-virtual agent and human-robot interactions, and I will highlight our research findings on personality and its relationship with engagement. I will continue my talk with a brief introduction to our current work towards deploying such technologies in healthcare, and I will conclude by discussing open problems in the area.


Bio:

Oya Celiktutan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Personal Robotics Lab in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, United Kingdom. Before this, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Lab at University of Cambridge between 2016 and 2017, and in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London between 2013 and 2015. She obtained her PhD degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey, in collaboration with National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, France, in 2013. Her research focuses on computer vision and machine learning within a context of applied work in the areas of human behaviour understanding, affective computing, human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction. She is particularly interested in building smart algorithms to equip machines with the capability of sensing, recognising and interpreting human behaviours for enabling personalised, engaging and assistive interactions with machines.

Asst. Prof. Serdar Çiftçi (Harran University) is going to give a seminar on Visual Privacy Protection Using False Colors, for Multimedia Informatics - Research Methods (MMI 700) course. You are all kindly invited. Sorry for multiple copies.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: January 3, 2018, 11:30-12:30

Visual Privacy Protection Using False Colors

Abstract:

Privacy protection in video surveillance is an important problem, and it will become even more important, as video surveillance is gains in popularity. However, simple methods for protecting privacy are not sufficient as they do not contain all the desired attributes that is expected from a good privacy protection algorithm. Privacy protected images must be reversible if the need arises to view them as unprotected (e.g., during a criminal investigation). Furthermore, protected image should not prohibit non-private statistics to be extracted. Also, the protected content should not be visually disturbing as it is the case with some of the existing privacy protection methods. Perhaps most importantly, the protection must be continuous: that is faces even in a single frame of a video should not remain unprotected. The algorithms that rely on computer vision techniques may therefore be vulnerable to this problem: if an algorithm fails to detect a sensitive region, it will remain unprotected.

In this seminar, methods that are commonly used for visual privacy protection will be reviewed and then a balanced method that was proposed in Ciftci's Ph.D. thesis will be mentioned. The proposed method is reversible, does not create disturbing outputs, do not prohibit collecting non-private information, does not rely on computer vision techniques.

Bio:

Serdar Ciftci is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at Harran University. He has obtained his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Selcuk University in 2007. He received both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) respectively in 2001 and 2017. He has been in Multimedia Signal Processing Group Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a visiting researcher between January-March 2016. His primary research interest is visual privacy protection. He is a reviewer for various international journals and conferences such as TUBITAK Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Selcuk University Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (SUJEST), and ACM Multimedia 2017.

Department of Health Informatics Research Assistant recruitment process has been completed. As a result, selected and replacement candidates are below:

.Selected(Asil):

Bengi Ruken Yavuz

Replacement/Yedek:

Heval Ataş 

Next Wednesday, Dr. Çiğdem Beyan (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) is going to give a seminar on Social Signal Processing (SSP) approaches, particularly for emergent leadership, for Multimedia Informatics - Research Methods (MMI 700) course. You are all kindly invited. Sorry for multiple copies.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: December 27, 2017, 11:30-12:30

Abstract:

Social interactions are the main facet of human life and also the fundamental research area for social psychology. Even though psychologists have been working on social interactions for a very long time, the automatic analysis of them is a relatively new problem. Social signal processing (SSP) is the field which aims to analyze human interactions in an automatic way using the recent advances in machine analysis (e.g. speech processing, computer vision, machine learning). In this talk, I will survey some approaches and results regarding identification of the social interactions in small group meeting environments particularly for emergent leadership. In detail, a new corpus that has been collected using portable audio and video sensors, novel nonverbal features proposed and the computational methods used will be addressed.

Bio:

Cigdem Beyan is a postdoctoral researcher at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision (PAVIS) department since September 2015. In PAVIS-IIT, she has been working on social signal processing. She obtained her Ph.D. degree (2015) in School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK, under supervision of Prof. Robert B. Fisher. Her thesis was a part of EU project (FP7) called Fish4Knowledge, in which she mainly investigated fish behaviour understanding. Prior to that, she received her MSc. degree (2010) in School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University where she worked on multiple object tracking and abandoned-object detection utilizing multi-modalities. Beyond her research background, she has a teaching experience (in Turkey and in UK) for 6 years. Additionally, she has been an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of attainment against the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and learning support in higher education since 2014. She contributed to the computer vision, machine learning and multimedia domains by being (co-) author of more than 25 research papers and has a PCT Patent Application to WIPO. She is a reviewer for various international journals such as Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and for the conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, BMVC, and ICPR.

Please follow the date and time information on the table. Times on OIBS (Student Affairs Information System) may not be accurate.

The list will be updated as soon as information about the missing classes is recieved

This Wednesday, Dr. Sertan Şentürk (soon to join the R&D team in Kobalt music) is going to give a seminar titled “What is Music Information Retrieval? Applications and the State-of-the-Art” for Multimedia Informatics - Research Methods (MMI 700) course. You are all kindly invited.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: December 20, 2017, 11:30-12:30

Abstract: What is Music Information Retrieval? Applications and the State-of-the-Art

Music, without a doubt, is one of the pinnacles of human creativity, communication and culture. With the digital media revolution and the rise of music streaming services, there has recently been a growing interest and a high demand to process large-scale musical material such as audio recordings, music scores and album reviews. In this talk, I will provide a gentle introduction to music information retrieval (MIR), an interdisciplinary field which “incorporates elements from signal processing, machine learning, psychology, musicology, and many more” to retrieve relevant information from music. From recommendation systems to automatic music generation, I will present a wide variety of examples involving MIR and discuss how such technologies are being used in academic and industrial settings, for example in music streaming, computational musicology and music education.

Bio
I am a data scientist, specializing in music information retrieval, soon to join the R&D team in Kobalt music. My research involves developing signal processing and machine learning based computational methodologies to automatically describe and discover music. Throughout the years, I have worked on creating robust and scalable solutions for a vast number of tasks such as audio-score alignment, automatic genre/mode classification, music structure analysis, and audio fingerprinting.

In February 2017, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Technologies from the Music Technology Group in Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. I received my MSc. degree in Music Technology from Georgia Institute of Technology, the USA in 2011, and my BSc. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey in 2009. I have also completed a four-year, part-time classical guitar program from Hacettepe University Ankara State Conservatory in 2009.

Health Informatics Department Research Assistant exam will be held on 22 December 2017  Friday at 10:00 in A Block 108. The names of the candidates who will enter the evaluation exam are as follows: