Beyond the teraflop: Machines that observe and understand

An open lecture by:

Dr. Aristodemos Pnevmatikakis
Professor at Athens Information Technology

When: Tuesday, 19 February, 18:00-20:00

Where: Center for the Arts Auditorium

Organized by: The Graduate Master Class Series, School of Graduate and Professional Education

To reserve your place please contact Ms. Maria Kritikou via email: [email protected] or telephone: 210 6009800 ext. 1210


Lecture Description

Humans can easily recognize familiar objects they see, or the sound of their favorite instrument in an orchestral recording, but they can easily spend minutes trying to multiply two numbers with a few decimal digits. Machines that we can afford to buy for our homes, can on the other hand multiply more than 10 trillion floating-point numbers in a second, yet encounter severe difficulties in familiarizing themselves with objects they sense in order to recognize them later. This lecture is about the fundamentals of building machines that observe and understand their surroundings in an attempt to offer services to people. We will consider what is needed, how to achieve understanding and finally why this is important, by following through many examples.

Aristodemos Pnevmatikakis

Dr. Aristodemos Pnevmatikakis is a professor at Athens Information Technology, with more than 20 years’ experience in signal processing. His prime research interest is in systems for multimodal detection, tracking and identification, aiming at activity recognition in intelligent spaces. To this extend he utilises signals from cameras, microphones and wearable, environmental and domotics sensors. He is co-author of the books Audio-Visual Person Tracking: A Practical Approach (Imperial College Press, London, UK, Summer 2011) and Delta-Sigma Modulators, Modeling, Design and Applications (Imperial College Press, London, UK, 2003). His research has resulted to a series of scientific publications and has been featured on regional and international media and events, while the resulting systems have been successfully evaluated at international evaluation campaigns. He has been involved in numerous EU and national research and industrial projects.

He received his BSc in Physics from University of Patras, Greece in 1993 and his MSc and PhD from Imperial College, University of London in 1995 and 1999 respectively. Since July 2003, he is with Athens Information Technology and since Feb. 2016 he collaborates with Athens Tech College. Since May 2016 he serves as a technical advisor to MoodMe. Since May 2017 he participates to the CC2U initiative. He has been Chief Technical Officer at Dynasense PC (2014-2015), with the Development Programs Dept. of Intracom Telecom (2001-2003) and with the Analogue and RF Design Group of Integrated Systems Development (1999-2001).