ADSC Hosts Demo Day for Illinois Alumni in Singapore

11/2/2012 ADSC Staff

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) hosted a Demo Day on November 19, 2011 for alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign currently living in Singapore.

Written by ADSC Staff

2011 Alumni Demo Day
2011 Alumni Demo Day
The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) hosted a Demo Day on November 19, 2011 for alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign currently living in Singapore. The Demo Day highlighted the technological and scientific advances ADSC researchers have been making with demonstrations of many of the applications derived from their research.

The event began with breakfast and a question-and-answer session with special guest Illinois alumnus Eric Bina, co-creator of Mosaic. The alumni were very engaged by Bina's description of the evolution of the early Web browser. Afterwards Bina said, "Alumni seemed interested in hearing about the history of Mosaic up to the start of Netscape."

Eric Bina
Eric Bina
After breakfast, the Illinois alumni were treated to demonstrations of several of ADSC's current research projects. The following is a list of demonstrations that were included in the presentation:
  • Video cutout and chat: Cut out your background and replace it with another background, all in real time, using your ordinary webcam and computer. Control your appearance, too, with an array of special effects. (Fundamental research contribution: real-time foreground/background separation with commodity hardware.)
  • 3D sound direction finding: Watch a miniature microphone array track the direction of your voice in three dimensions as you move around it, in real time. (Fundamental research contribution: real-time 3D audio direction finding with portable hardware.)
  • Face recognition: Our system recognizes faces automatically with near-perfect accuracy, even when people disguise themselves with dark glasses. (Fundamental research contribution: high-accuracy face recognition with occlusion and/or poor lighting.)
  • Automated personal trainer for physical rehabilitation: No need to travel to the clinic for your rehab session. Our Kinect-based system checks to make sure you are doing your shoulder exercises properly, and reports back to the clinic. (Fundamental research contribution: object pose recognition with high accuracy in real time with commodity hardware.)
  • new technology
    new technology
    Implement your algorithm in hardware, without hardware expertise: ADSC's hardware researchers cross-compile code written for GPUs to run on FPGAs. Their high-level synthesis system requires minimal hardware expertise, turnaround time is quick, and the resulting hardware designs are good. (Fundamental research contribution: hardware synthesis from a C-like language.)
  • Brush-and-drag interface for photo editing: Have 25 similar photos of your baby? Our new iPad interface makes it a lot easier to pick the best one. (Fundamental research challenge: human-friendly interfaces to large-scale visual data.)
  • Sports video analysis: The Illinois football team has two full-time staff members who do nothing but watch football videos and analyze what is happening in them. We're working to put those two guys out of a job. (Fundamental research contribution: high-accuracy video frame registration and object tracking.)
  • Hemcam: This camera in the ceiling sees everything going on below, like a fisheye camera, but without distortion. You can choose any sub-view that interests you, in current or pre-recorded footage. (Fundamental research contribution:  low-cost, distortion-free replacement for fisheye camera.)
  • Alumni Demo Day group
    Alumni Demo Day group
    Restaurant guide for iPad: It looks like a normal Google-maps-based restaurant locator and guide, but ours is automatically extracting information about each restaurant from half a dozen different Web sources and automatically analyzing and summarizing all the information found there. (Fundamental research contribution: automatic extraction of structure, such as schema and attribute values, from unstructured free-form text, and summarization.)

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center is a Singapore-based research center for faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ADSC focuses on breakthrough innovations information technology.


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This story was published November 2, 2012.