Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics Seminar: Robert Pless

Description

Robert Pless, a professor and the chair of Computer Science at George Washington University, will give a talk entitled "Supporting Sex Trafficking Investigations with Deep Metric Learning" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics. Pless's research focuses on geometrical and statistical Computer Vision.

Abstract:

This talk shares work to develop traffickCam, a system to support sex trafficking investigations by recognizing the hotel rooms in pictures of trafficking victims. I'll share context for this project and ways that this system is currently being used at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as special challenges that come from this problem domain such as dramatic differences in rooms within a hotel and the similarity of rooms across chains. Attacking these problems led us to specific improvements in large scale classification with Deep Metric Learning, including novel training algorithms, visual explainability, and new visualization approaches to compare and understand the representations they learn.