Natural language understanding and grounding in 3D environments

Speaker:             Angel Xuan Chang

Time:                  13:00, Oct. 26th.

Location:            SIST 1A-200

Host:                   Prof. Kai Wang

Abstract:

In popular imagination, household robots that we can instruct to “bring me my red mug from the kitchen” are common. For a robot to execute such an instruction, it needs to parse and interpret natural language, understand the 3D environment it is in (e.g. what objects exist and how they are described), navigate to locate the target object, and then interact appropriately with the target object. I will talk about recent work that introduces 3D datasets for natural language grounding, as well as work that investigates various tasks requiring 3D object localization, interaction, and reasoning.

Bio:

Angel Xuan Chang is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair with Amii. Prior to this, she was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a research scientist at Eloquent Labs working on dialogue. Dr. Chang’s research focuses on the intersection of natural language understanding, computer graphics, and AI. Her research connects language to 3D representations of shapes and scenes and addresses grounding of language for embodied agents in indoor environments, as well as 3D content creation from language. Her group also works on using machine learning for biodiversity monitoring, specifically with DNA barcodes as part of the larger BIOSCAN project. Her work has been recognized by awards such as a 3DV best paper award for Omages, and the SGP dataset award for ShapeNet and ScanNet.