Me working in the lab (a long time ago)

Amin Atrash amin.atrash at gmail.com

Research

Current Work

Previous Projects

• Multilanguage Speech to Text - While working at BBN Research Labs, I worked on the development of their Byblos speech recognition systems. This involved developing system to recognize languages such as english, arabic, spanish, and mandarin for delivery to a client, as well as experiments for the yearly evaluations.

• Context Recognition and Localization through Everyday Gestures - An attempt to extend the previous workshop recognition project to a more general case. By using the techniques studying in the workshop recognition project, we are attempted to recognize general everyday activites such as walking, typing, eating, reading, writing, etc... Once these lower level behaviors are recognized, the context of the user can be determined. In addition, localization techniques from robot research can be used to probabilistically determine and maintain the users location.
  Advisor: Prof. Thad Starner

• GT2k - The Georgia Tech Gesture Recognition Toolkit - Gesture recognition is becoming a more common interface for new systems. GT2k attempts to provide researchers and system designers with a toolkit to create the gesture recognition component of larger systems. By using existing recognition technology to provide training and recognition tools, researchers and designers can focus on the more important issues of the system. GT2k builds on top of an existing speech recognition hidden Markov Model toolkit, HTK.
  Advisor: Prof. Thad Starner

• Recognizing Workshop Activity Using Body Worn Microphones and Accelerometers - By using simple on-body sensor such as microphones and accelerometers, it is possible to determine the actions of a user. In this experiment, the actions consisted of workshop activities such as hammering or sawing. LDA was used to model the audio data while HMMs were used to model the accelerometer data. By using properities of sound travelling, the audio can be used to aid in parititioning the continuous data, reducing continuous recognition to an isolated recognition problem. The goal of the project was to perform continuous recognition of the users actions, and thus context, based on the simple sensors.
  Advisor: Prof. Thad Starner
  Publication: ps pdf

• GRACE - The Social Robot - A joint project between NRL, CMU, Swarthmore, and Metrica involved developing GRACE for the AAAI robot competition. GRACE is a RWI B21r robot equipped with VIKIA (a virtual face displayed on an LCD), speech recognition, and speech generation. Our task in the project was to use human robot interaction to get GRACE from the door of the registration hall to the registration desk. This involved locating humans, asking for directions, and acting upon those directions.
  Advisors: Alan Schultz
  Publication: See AAAI Magazine, Summer 2003

• Robot Localization Using an Omnicam - The goal of this project is to perform robot localization based on an omnicam mounted to the top of a robot. The omnicam returns a 360 degree view around the robot. Different methods were used to localize. A simplier method involved placing feducials around the building and using a Kalman Filter to maintain position. A more complex method involved applying PCA on the raw images.
  Advisor: Prof. Frank Dellaert

• DARPA MARS project. My focus in the project is on probabilistic planning and execution in behavior based systems. By applying POMDPs (Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes), plans can be created which help behavior-based robotic system deal with uncertainty. This uncertainty may come from noise in the environment or sensor inaccuracy.
  Advisors: Prof. Sven Koenig Prof. Ron Arkin
  Publication: ps pdf

• Autonomous Pinball - Using Neural Networks, we are trying to learn low-level control for a physical pinball machine. The pinball machine is interfaced to the computer through a circuit which controls the flippers. A camera tracks the ball in play. This forces us to deal with issues such as real time processing, noise from the environment, and noise from the sensors, as well as learning a complex space.
  Advisor: Prof. Sven Koenig

• Continuous Localization - As a summer internship at the Naval Reserach Lab on applying the continuous localization technique on a robot to be used in outdoor environments. Continuous localization is a map-based localization technique initially developed on Nomads. Current work is in porting it to an ATRV Jr, a robot designed for outdoor enviroments. This involved integrating various sensors to help with localization, experimentation in small, high resolution indoor environments, and experimentation in large, low resolution outdoor environments.
  Advisor: Alan Schultz William Adams
  Publication: ps pdf

• Gesture Recognition on the Perceptive Workbench - for my Ubiquitous Computing class, I implemented a gesture recognition system for the perceptive workbench. The perceptive workbench is a desk with a camera beneath which can observe the desk top. By using HMMs (Hidden Markov Models), gestures could be training on the table which could then be used to control applications.
  Advisor: Prof. Thad Starner