*_Distinguished Lecture Series_*

*Speaker:* Alexei Efros, Carnegie Mellon University

*Title:* Mining Big Visual Data

*Day:* Friday, November 16th

*Time:* 2:00pm-3:00pm

*Location:* Jajodia Auditorium, Nguyen Engineering

*Abstract:*

There are an estimated 3.5 trillion photographs in the world, of which 
10% have been taken in the past 12 months. Facebook alone reports 6 
billion photo uploads per month. Every minute, 72 hours of video are 
uploaded to YouTube. Cisco estimates that in the next few years, visual 
data (photos and video) will account for over 85% of total internet 
traffic. Yet, we currently lack effective computational methods for 
making sense of all this mass of visual data. Unlike easily indexed 
content, such as text, visual content is not routinely searched or 
mined; it's not even hyperlinked. Visual data is Internet's "digital 
dark matter" [Perona,2010] -- it's just sitting there!

In this talk, I will first discuss some of the unique challenges that 
make Big Visual Data difficult compared to other types of content. In 
particular, I will argue that the central problem is the lack a good 
measure of similarity for visual data. I will then present some of our 
recent work that aims to address this challenge in the context of visual 
matching, image retrieval and visual data mining. As an application of 
the latter, we used Google Street View data for an entire city in an 
attempt to answer that age-old question which has been vexing poets (and 
poets-turned-geeks): "What makes Paris look like Paris?"

*Bio:*

Alexei (Alyosha) Efros is an associate professor at the Robotics 
Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon 
University. His research is in the area of computer vision and computer 
graphics, especially at the intersection of the two. He is particularly 
interested in using data-driven techniques to tackle problems which are 
very hard to model parametrically but where large quantities of data are 
readily available. Alyosha received his PhD in 2003 from UC Berkeley 
under Jitendra Malik and spent the following year as a post-doctoral 
fellow in Andrew Zisserman's group in Oxford, England. Alyosha is a 
recipient of CVPR Best Paper Award (2006), NSF CAREER award (2006), 
Sloan Fellowship (2008), Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), Okawa Grant 
(2008), Finmeccanica Career Development Chair (2010), SIGGRAPH 
Significant New Researcher Award (2010), and ECCV Best Paper Honorable 
Mention (2010).