Note: Laura Sevilla has transitioned from the institute (alumni).
Since August 2017 I'm a visiting researcher at Facebook in Menlo Park, CA. My research interests are in motion estimation and video understanding. In particular I'm interested in exploring and modeling how the semantics and the motion of the scene are related.
Short Bio
Before joining Facebook I was a postdoc at Perceiving Systems from February 2015 to July 2017. Before, I got my PhD from UMass Amherst, where my advisor was Erik Learned-Miller. My thesis was on motion estimation under long displacements and large changes in the scene. During that time I was lucky to collaborate with great people at Adobe Research, where we created an application to video editing, and also here at MPI. I also interned at Apple, with the Voice Over team using computer vision to make their technology accessible for people who are visually impaired. Before, I got my masters from Brown University thanks to a fellowship from the Caja Madrid Foundation. In 2007 I got my bachelors in computer engineering from the University of Granada, in Spain, where I'm originally from.
Resumé
Here is my resumé.
In addition to basic research, I have a special interest in applications of technology for the greater good.
-
In the summer of 2015 I organized and taught a workshop in computer vision and robotics for advanced teenagers in the island of Camiguin (Philippines). Our goal was to empower children with basic knowledge of computer science, with the hope that they can use this knowledge for applications in their own environment. In this spirit, we did projects on species recognition, garbage collection and machine translation from English to Bisaya. See more on this video.
All this was possible thanks to the AMD department at the MPI who lent us a NAO robot, the government of Camiguin and especially the Kilaha Foundation.
- During the summer of 2009 I was lucky to intern at the Voice Over team at Apple, which makes their technology accessible for people with disabilities. Back at UMass and inspired by this experience, we made this app for recognition of American notes.