About The Forum
Artificial Intelligence
Spotlight Research Projects
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Steps like prototyping, ideation and discovery are often best accomplished by building a functional piece of software quickly and easily without the typical concerns of a broader- scale software engineering project.
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Helping People Hack: Tools for Opportunistic Programming|
An artist might spend weeks fretting over questions of depth, scale and perspective in a landscape painting, but once it is done, what's left is a two-dimensional image with a fixed point of view. But the Make3d algorithm, developed by Stanford computer scientists, can take any two-dimensional image and create a three-dimensional "fly around" model of its content, giving viewers access to the scene's depth and a range of points of view.
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Make3D|
Dryad is a design tool for virtual trees. The user creates a tree by visually exploring the space of all trees. Dryads around the world communicate to share which trees were picked in the past. A collaborative mapping of the tree space emerges, which every Dryad utilizes to guide users to higher-quality parts of the space.
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Dryad|
The keyboard and mouse have been the dominant forms of input on computer systems. However, with the increasing accuracy and decreasing cost of eye gaze tracking systems it will soon be practical to use gaze as a form of input in addition to keyboard and mouse. In the GUIDe (Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design) project in the HCI Group at Stanford University we are exploring how gaze information can be used as an augmented input.
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GUIDe: Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design|
Wireless networks are convenient, increase productivity, and enable new services and applications. However, they are difficult to secure, configure, and manage. The falling prices of IEEE 802.11 hardware enables the use of higher number of access points, increasing overall network capacity and allowing services to scale to much higher number of users. In practice, however, such high-density deployments are challenged in many ways: (i) higher management costs, due to access point configuration and maintenance, (ii) increased security risks, due to misconfigured access points or improperly managed user credentials (passwords, private keys), (iii) potentially higher interference levels, which can considerably degrade performance.
The objective of the KIWI project is to build self-managed wireless LANs that scale to high number of access points and clients. We explore the capabilities of wireless LANs managed by a wireless appliance (WA), a device that controls all access points (APs). The WA gathers information about all clients in the network, being able amongst other things to establish their location accurately, restrict network connectivity to a targeted geographical area, and minimize the effects of misbehaving devices.
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KIWI Project - Towards Self-Managed Wireless LANs|
This work will help biodiversity researchers Acquire digital materials in the field, manage these online holdings (Curate), and Transfer the knowledge (or disseminate) to other researchers, museums, and the public. We will create three sets of tools:
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BioACT!|
Stanley and the Stanford Racing Team were awarded 2 million dollars for being the first team to complete the 132 mile DARPA Grand Challenge course. Stanley finished in just under 6 hours 54 minutes and averaged over 19 miles per hours on the course.
The Grand Challenge, first held in March 2004, is an off-road robot competition devised by DARPA to promote research in the area of autonomous vehicles. The challenge, in general terms, is to build a robot capable of navigating without human intervention over 130 miles of rough terrain in less than 10 hours.
Calling this task a Grand Challenge is not an exaggeration! The 2004 course started in Barstow, California (1.5 hours outside of Los Angeles) and ended in Primm, Nevada. The most successful competitor navigated only 7.5 miles out of the 142 mile course.
We invite you to visit www.stanfordracing.org to check on our progress!
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DARPA Grand Challenge|
Since 1996, research on light fields has followed a number of lines. On the theoretical side, researchers have developed spatial and frequency domain analyses of light field sampling and have proposed several new parameterizations of the light field, including surface light fields and unstructured Lumigraphs. On the practical side, researchers have experimented with literally dozens of ways to capture light fields, ranging from camera arrays to kaleidoscopes, as well as several ways to display them, such as an array of video projectors aimed at a lenticular sheet.
Researchers have also explored the relationship between light fields and other sampled representations of light transport, such as incident light fields and reflectance fields. At Stanford, we have focused on the boundary between light fields, photography, and high-performance imaging, an area we sometimes call computational photography. However, our research also touches on other aspects of light fields, such as interactive animation of light fields and computing shape from light fields.
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Light Fields & Computational Photography|
The goal of this research is to enable a multi-limbed robot to climb vertical rock using techniques similar to those developed by human climbers. The robot consists of a small number of articulated limbs. Only the limb end-points can make contact with the environment—a vertical surface with small, arbitrarily distributed features called holds. A path through this environment is a sequence of one-step climbing moves in which the robot brings a limb end-point to a new hold. The robot maintains balance during each move by pushing and/or pulling at other holds, exploiting contact and friction at these holds while adjusting internal degrees of freedom to avoid sliding. The fixed set of robot-hold contacts during a one-step move is called a stance. Our planner combines a multi-step and a one-step planner. The multi-step planner searches a graph representing the adjacency relation between stances to compute a sequence of steps from the initial to the goal stance. The one-step planner (a PRM planner) searches the robot’s configuration space at a given stance for a feasible path between the previous and the next stance in the sequence computed by the multi-step planner. The one-step planner makes use of an efficient test efficient of the quasi-static equilibrium of thee robot. The multi-step planner makes use of lazy search techniques to speed up the exploration of the stance graph. It also makes use of a trained classifier to quickly recognize infeasible transitions between stances. The planner was tested in simulation and on a real four-limbed robot—LEMUR IIB—created by NASA/JPL. A new climbing robot with an increased number of degrees of freedom is currently being developed. In another develop, we adapt and extend the planner to the ATHLETE robot, a six-legged vehicle designed by NASA/JPL to climb steep, irregular, and possibly non-rigid lunar terrain. In such terrain ATHLETE’s wheels are frozen and are used as “feet”. This project is a joint effort with the group of Prof. Steve Rock in the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Lab.
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Climbing Robots|
The Common Password Problem. Users tend to use a single password at many different web sites. By now there are several reported cases where attackers breaks into a low security site to retrieve thousands of username/password pairs and directly try them one by one at a high security e-commerce site such as eBay. As expected, this attack is remarkably effective.
A Simple Solution. PwdHash is a browser extension that transparently converts a user's password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself. A break-in at a low security site exposes password hashes rather than an actual password. We emphasize that the hash function we use is public and can be computed on any machine which enables users to login to their web accounts from any machine in the world. Hashing is done using a Pseudo Random Function (PRF).
Phishing protection. A major benefit of PwdHash is that it provides a defense against password phishing scams. In a phishing scam, users are directed to a spoof web site where they are asked to enter their username and password. SpoofGuard is a browser extension that alerts the user when a phishing page is encountered. PwdHash complements SpoofGuard in defending users from phishng scams: using PwdHash the phisher only sees a hash of the password specific to the domain hosting the spoof page. This hash is useless at the site that the phisher intended to spoof.
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PwdHash - Web Password Hashing|
Volumetric models of facial musculature enable highly realistic computer simulations of visual speech and expressive face motion. This research addresses the performance, control and analysis challenges that arise from the simulation of such high detail models and caters to both computer graphics and medical applications.
Realistic simulation and analysis of facial expressions is an open research problem with a wide range of potential applications such as special effects, communications, visual speech synthesis and maxillofacial medicine. The goals of visual realism and biophysical accuracy suggest a clear advantage for simulation methods that respect the anatomy of the face by modeling the tissue composition of the flesh and employ the underlying musculature as the driving force behind the formation of expressions.
This project involves the development of novel algorithms for increasing the computational performance of high resolution face models by several orders of magnitude, enhancing the quality of all visual elements involved in the simulation and providing convenient, intuitive and efficient ways of controlling the motion of the face, for example using easy to obtain motion capture data.
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Simulation & Analysis of Muscle Actuated 3D Face Models|
Trio is a new database system that manages not only data, but also the accuracy and lineage of the data. Approximate (uncertain, probabilistic, ncomplete, fuzzy, and imprecise!) databases have been proposed in the past, and the lineage problem also has been studied. The goals of the Trio project are:
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TRIO: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage|
Increasing use of computers and networks in business, government, recreation, and almost all aspects of daily life has led to a proliferation of online sensitive data, i.e., data that, if used improperly, can harm the data subjects. As a result, concern about the ownership, control, privacy, and accuracy of these data has become a top priority. This project focuses on both the technical challenges of handling sensitive data and the policy and legal issues facing data subjects, data owners, and data users.
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PORTIA: Managing sensitive information in a wired world