Contact Info

HP-Labs
1501 Page Mill Rd,
Palo Alto,CA,94304, USA
Email: iracohen ,at, ifp.uiuc.edu

 I was part of the IFP lab, with the research group of Prof. Thomas S. Huang. Currently, I am a researcher at HP labs in Palo Alto. My HP home page can be found here.

Research Interests

· Statistical modeling in AI

· Semi-supervised learning for classification

· Multi-modal Human computer intelligent interaction

· Event recognition in video

· Visual tracking

Click on the images below to see videos showing our real time facial expression recognition system, combining all of the above topics for this cool (but for the time being limited) application:

We track the face (Jilin Tu did a lot of this work), extract motion features, model the facial expressions with Bayesian networks ( implemented using the JavaBayes engine), learn the parameters and structure of the Bayesian networks using labeled and unlabeled data (see publications for details on all aspects of learning with labeled and unlabeled data), and finally recognize the facial expression as the one with highest probability (marked in read)

Note: The videos are of two subjects from the Cohn-Kanade facial expression database. Any use of these videos should follow the guidelines that can be found at http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/idb/html/face/facial_expression/index.html

 On going collaborations (with people outside my small world in Urbana-Champaign):

· Alex Bronstein and Marsha Duro, Internet systems and Storage, HP-Labs, Palo-Alto.

· Prof. Fabio G. Cozman and his research group (especially Marcelo C. Cirelo), University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

· Dr. Nicu Sebe, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Publications and Patents

Projects

• NSF-ITR: Multimodal Human Computer Interaction: Toward a Proactive computer: This project will make our real time facial expression recognition system a very useful tool.
• Factor graphs for photometric stereo surface reconstruction : This is a novel application of loopy belief propagation applied to a classic computer vision problem, work done with Nemanja Petrovic.

Resume

My Links:

• Albums on Webshots
• Informative links
• Omer Cohen's music webpage: Both instrumental and vocal songs, written and performed by my musician brother (well, all except for the singing part).
• Prof. Miriam Cohen's webpage

Orbium software - great DB comparison tool that I found.

Personal Interests:

Distance running: I ran my first Marathon on my 30’th birthday (2001 Chicago marathon), 2002 Chicago marathon results+pictures)

Skydiving (Falling Illini Skydiving club) (Video of my level 3 AFF jump in Hollister, CA (altitute 15,000 feet) (Video of Jump 7) (Video of Jump 8) (Falling on my butt)

(The hardest/easiest moment: Letting go of the plane)

Visitors since Jan 2003.