By Dimitris Metaxas (Rutgers University)

Talk Abstract: Modeling Interacting Dynamic Systems is an important topic due to its many applications including autonomous driving and physical simulations. Many approaches model Interacting Dynamic Systems in temporal and relational dimensions. However, these approaches usually fail to learn the underlying continuous temporal dynamics, agent interactions and their dynamic adaptation explicitly. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Data Driven approach in the form of an interacting system of ordinary differential equations (ISODE). Our approach uses the latent space of Neural ODEs to model continuous temporal dynamics by incorporating distance and interaction intensity into agent dynamic interaction modeling. In addition, we show how to control and update dynamically without retraining an agent’s trajectory when obstacles and targets are introduced dynamically. Extensive experiments reveal that our ISODE DDDAS approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art. We also show how an agent can dynamically avoid suddenly appearing obstacles and how to effectively control the agent motion by introducing attractors and repellers.

Speaker Bio: Dimitris Metaxas is a Distinguished Professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at Rutgers University. He is directing the Center for Computational Biomedicine, Imaging and Modeling (CBIM) and the NSF University-Industry Collaboration Center CARTA with emphasis on real time and scalable data analytics, AI and machine learning methods with applications to computational biomedicine and computer vision. Dr. Metaxas has been conducting research towards the development of novel methods and technology upon which AI, machine learning, physics-based modeling, computer vision, medical image analysis, and computer graphics can advance synergistically. Dr. Metaxas has published over 700 research articles in these areas and has graduated 63 PhD students, who occupy prestigious academic and industry positions. His research has been funded by NIH, NSF, AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, HSARPA, and the ONR. Dr. Metaxas work has received many best paper awards and he has 8 patents. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1986, is a recipient of an NSF Research Initiation and Career awards, and an ONR YIP. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the MICCAI Society. He has been general chair of IEEE CVPR 2014, Program Chair of ICCV 2007, General Chair of ICCV 2011, FIMH 20011 and MICCAI 2008 and the Senior Program Chair for SCA 2007.