(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:     Prof. Lihi Zelnik-Manor
                   Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion

Monday, June 4^th, 2018
15:00 - 16:00

Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Maintaining Internal Image Statistics in Synthesized Images
 

Abstract

Recent work has shown impressive success in automatically creating new images with desired properties such as transferring painterly style, modifying facial expressions or manipulating the center of attention of the image. In this talk I will discuss two of the standing challenges in image synthesis and how we tackle them:
- I will describe our efforts in making the synthesized images more photo-realistic.
- I will further show how we can broaden the scope of data that can be used for training synthesis networks, and with that provide a solution to new applications.

BIO

Lihi Zelnik-Manor is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in the Technion, Israel, where she also serves as the Academic Liaison between Technion and CornellTech. Prior to the Technion, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Engineering and Applied Science in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She holds a PhD and MSc (with honors) in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science and a BSc (summa cum laude) in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion. She was a visiting Associate Professor at CornellTech between 2014 and 2016.
Prof. Zelnik-Manor’s awards and honors include the Sloan-Swartz postdoctoral fellowship, the best Student Paper Award at the IEEE SMI'05, the AIM@SHAPE Best Paper Award 2005, and the people's choice award at WACV2018. She is also a recipient of the Gutwirth prize for the promotion of research and several grants from ISF, MOST, the 7th European R&D Program, and others.
Prof Zelnik-Manor has served as Area Chair for ECCV and CVPR multiple times, as Program Chair of CVPR’16 and as Associate Editor at TPAMI. She has further had industrial collaborations with Intel, Adobe, and Microsoft Research.

You are invited to attend a lecture

Epsilon Near Zero Materials – Photonics on Steroids?

By:

Jacob B Khurgin

Prof. at Electrical and Computer Engineering department, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

We examine the characteristics of optical materials with near zero real part of permittivity (ENZ), and compare them with other materials relying on resonance where Re(婾0 (e.g. plasmonics) or Re(1/婾0 (e.g. slow light, microresonators, e.t.c.). Despite being seemingly very diverse phenomena all of the resonant effects share a key common characteristics – slow group velocity. Consequently, whether one operates near a zero or a pole in optical response, one is bound to gain the same very useful enhancement of some properties such as nonlinearity, and, regrettably, the commensurate increase of loss and reduction in bandwidth.  As  a result, ENZ materials offer very little when it comes to modulation and switching that cannot be attained in the more mundane materials.

On Tuesday, May 29, 2018, 13:00

Room 011, Kitot building

Speaker:  Yoav Sklut

M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Uri Shaked.

Wednesday, May 30^th, 2018 at 15:00

Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

A New Weighted Energy Limitation Method for H infinity Control of Linear Deterministic Systems

Abstract

In the H infinity control problem, one would like to achieve a minimum disturbance attenuation level for a given dynamic system. In many cases, the optimal H infinity state-feedback controller produces large gains that cannot be applied in practice, this mainly occurs near optimum. The common methods, currently in use, fail to address the significance of the controller's energy. In this talk, two methods are presented that address the controller energy problem. The first method provides a simple, yet effective, tool for energy limitation. The second method takes a different approach, allowing less conservative results. The two methods can be extended to weighted energy limitation, i.e. each state variable can have a different weight in the total energy of the controller. A weighted energy limitation can be applied to solve the static output-feedback problem, where a large weight is put on the direction orthogonal to the output of the system. The latter is most important in the case where the system encounters uncertainties. In this case, there is no known solution to the robust output-feedback control problem. Our solution provides not only simple static output-feedback in the uncertain case, but it also provides a means for limiting the energy of the control effort. The two methods have been developed for linear deterministic continuous systems, and are easily applied to various other problems, such as systems with state-multiplicative noise. Two numerical examples are presented that demonstrate the applicability of the theory developed.