About Me

Hello. My name is Bipin. I'm currently a second year Master's student at Stanford University, studying Computer Science.

Before this, for six years, I built search-engines. Not surprisingly, I like engineering large-scale systems, spend nights coding furiously, and hope that robots take over the world. No, really.

My Research

Robotics

Autonomous Sign Reading for Semantic Mapping and Navigation

Teaching robots about our world through instruction is a rather tedious and, sometimes, frustrating process. Could robots instead learn by wandering in our world, reading and understanding text that's usually littered in it?
In the summer of 2010, we programmed Willow Garage's PR2 to wander about my CS department's hallways, reading text on doors, and learning where people sat. Read about it in the Publications section below.

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Astronomy

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

The LSST is a monstrous 8.4-meter ground-based telescope, with the world's largest camera (3.2 Gigapixels). In the first 15 mins. of operation, the LSST will produce more data than the Hubble telescope has produced in its lifetime.
I'm building a system at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to cope with the hundreds of petabytes of data that's going to come streaming in. Check out our project page.

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Neuroscience

Modeling polysensory plasticity with unsupervised feature learning

One of the things that makes the brain fascinating is its plasticity. In a remarkable set of rewiring experiments, it was shown that the auditory cortex of the brain learnt to 'see' when visual signals were routed to it.
Does the brain have a single learning algorithm across all modalities? Read about our experiments in the Publications section below.

Teaching

Sakad, India

Though not related to my research, I spent the summer of 2009 teaching in a small village called Sakad in rural India.
I went there to teach the kids Math and English, but suspect I ended up learning more than I did teaching.

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Publications and Patents

• Unsupervised learning models of primary cortical receptive fields
  and receptive field plasticity.
  pdf
  In Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2011.
• Autonomous Sign Reading for Semantic Mapping.
  pdf
  In IEEE Conference on Robots and Automation (ICRA), 2011.
• On Random Weights and Unsupervised Feature Learning.
  pdf | code
  In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2011.
• Text Detection and Character Recognition in Scene Images
  with Unsupervised Feature Learning.

  pdf
  Best student paper award. In ICDAR, 2011.
• Modeling cortical representational plasticity with unsupervised feature learning.
  pdf
  In Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE), 2011.
• Automatic Product Categorization.
  pdf
  Patent 7870039 Issued on January 11, 2011.
• On Random Weights and Unsupervised Feature Learning.
  pdf
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Workshop, 2010.
• Predicting and Ranking Search Query Results.
  pdf
  Patent 7831595 Issued on November 9, 2010.
• System for obtaining of transcripts of non-textual media.
  pdf
  Patent 20090106243, Issued on April 23, 2009.
• Identifying offensive content using user click data.
  pdf
  Patent 20080162540, Issued on July 3, 2008.
• Method for sharing and searching play-lists.
  pdf
  Patent 20060195479, Issued on August 31, 2006.
• User interface for sharing and searching playlists
  pdf
  Patent 20060195480, Issued on August 31, 2006.
• Method and system for finding related nodes in a social network.
  pdf
  Patent 7016307 Issued on Mar 21, 2006.

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