George Papandreou – Home Page
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Contact info Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago Phone: +1-310-310-4614 |
About Me
Since December 2014 I have been working at Google as Research Scientist. I will continue to update this web page.
I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. My research interests are in computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal perception. My current focus is on deep learning. I approach these problems with methods from Bayesian statistics, signal processing, and applied mathematics.
From 2009 to 2013 I was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at UCLA, working with Prof. Alan Yuille. I hold a Diploma (2003) and a PhD (2009) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NTUA, Greece, where I was a CVSP group member, advised by Prof. Petros Maragos.
Recent Research Highlight: Deep Epitomic Convolutional Networks
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I have been exploring the powerful epitomic data structure for
transformation-aware image analysis and recognition. Building on image
epitomes, I have developed a new BoW-type model using a dictionary of flat
mini-epitomes learned in an unsupervised fashion from raw images. In my most
recent work in the context of deep learning, I have proposed the epitomic
convolution layer as a powerful replacement of a consecutive pair of
convolution and max-pooling layers. |
Recent Research Highlight: Perturb-and-MAP Random Fields
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I have been developing a new Perturb-and-MAP framework for one-shot random
sampling in Gaussian or discete-label Markov random fields
(MRF). Perturb-and-MAP random fields turn powerful deterministic energy
minimization methods into efficient random sampling algorithms. By avoiding
costly MCMC, one can generate in a fraction of a second independent random
samples from million-node networks. Applications include model parameter
estimation and solution uncertainty quantification in computer vision
applications. |
News
December 19, 2014 — Recent work (DeepLab-CRF arXiv paper) setting a new state-of-art (66.4 % IoU, further improved to 67.1 % IoU with the addition of intermediate layer features) in semantic image segmentation on the PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark. We refine densely computed convolutional neural network response maps with fully-connected conditional random fields. Algorithmic improvements allow us to compute dense segmentation maps in a fraction of a second. Joint work with Jay Chen and collaborators at Ecole Centrale Paris/INRIA, Google Research, and UCLA.
November 30, 2014 — Technical report on arXiv exploring explicit position, scale, and aspect ratio modeling in the context of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). We describe an improved version of our TTIC_ECP entry on the Imagenet 2014 image classification/localization competition. We further show that competitive object detection results (56.4 % mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007) are possible when applying DCNNs in a plain sliding window fashion. We describe some tricks that allow dense sliding window DCNN detection to surprisingly be faster than current two-stage approaches such as RCNN which rely on region proposal + scoring steps. Joint work with I. Kokkinos and P.-A. Savalle.
August 18, 2014 — Our TTIC_ECP entry on the Imagenet 2014 image classification competition achieved 10.2% top-5 error rate using our deep epitomic neural nets. See the ILSVRC2014 competition results.
August 18, 2014 — I am co-organizing the 3rd Workshop on Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics held in conjunction with NIPS 2014.
June 27, 2014 — I have received a second equipment gift from NVIDIA Corporation (two Tesla K40 GPUs) for my research in deep learning. Thanks NVIDIA!
June 10, 2014 — Pre-print on deep learning with mini-epitomes posted on arXiv.
March 1, 2014 — Paper on image modeling and recognition with mini-epitomes to appear at CVPR 2014.
February 8, 2014 — My review paper on Perturb-and-MAP appears as invited chapter in a forthcoming MIT Press book on Advanced Structured Prediction edited by S. Nowozin, P. Gehler, J. Jancsary, and C. Lampert. [pdf]
December 9, 2013 — Iasonas Kokkinos, Alex Bronstein, Michael Bronstein, and myself will be teaching a full-day tutorial on June 23, 2014 at CVPR 2014. The tutorial BASIS-14 (BASes for Images and Surfaces) will cover linear and non-linear image and surface analysis methods, from fundamental concepts to state-of-the-art techniques, from the viewpoint of basis expansions.
November 8, 2013 — I have received an equipment gift from NVIDIA Corporation (two Tesla K20 GPUs) for my ongoing research on deep generative models. This support is gratefully acknowledged.
August 20, 2013 — I am co-organizing the 2nd workshop on Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics, to be held in conjunction with NIPS 2013.
September 2013 — Our paper on Shape Epitomes for Image Labeling has been accepted at ICCV 2013.
June 2013 — On October 1st I will be joining the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago as a Research Assistant Professor.
August 17, 2012 — I am co-organizing a workshop on Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics, to be held in conjunction with NIPS 2012. The submission deadline has been extended to October 19, 2012.
June 23, 2011 — Our paper on Perturb-and-MAP Discrete-Valued Random Fields has been accepted and selected for oral presentation at ICCV 2011.
October 5, 2011 — Our paper on Bayesian Compressed Sensing has been accepted and selected for oral presentation at the IEEE Workshop on Information Theory in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, in conjunction with ICCV 2011.