Dhruv Batra's Homepage

Dhruv Batra
Research Assistant Professor
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC)

Email:
username -at- domain.edu
(where username = dbatra
domain = ttic)

Office: Room 417
Phone: 773-834-2622

Mailing Address:
6045 S. Kenwood Ave
Chicago IL 60637

News:

04/2012: From May-July 2012, I will be a Visiting Faculty at MLD, CMU, collaborating with Carlos Guestrin.

03/2012: I am helping co-teach Nati Srebro's Convex Optimization class at TTIC.

09/2011: I co-organized the NIPS 2011 Workshop on Supervised Similarity Learning, with Greg Shakhnarovich, Brian Kulis and Kilian Weinberger.

03/2011: From March-May 2011, I was a Visiting Scientist at CSAIL, MIT, collaborating with Bill Freeman.

03/2011: iCoseg among top downloaded articles from IJCV in the last 30 days.
[ Springer Page | Preprint pdf | Project Page ]

About Me

I am a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located in the campus of University of Chicago.

I recieved my Ph.D. in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was supervised by Tsuhan Chen. From spring 2009 till summer 2010, I was a visiting student at Cornell University following my advisor's move.

My research interests include machine learning and computer vision -- MAP inference in MRFs, max-margin methods, co-segmentation in multiple images, and interactive 3D modelling. I am also interested in applications of combinatorial optimization algorithms to learning and vision tasks.

In past, I have held visiting positions at:

• CSAIL, MIT, Spring 2011, Visiting Scientist collaborating with Bill Freeman
• Microsoft Research Lab Cambridge, Summer 2010, Research Intern with Sebastian Nowzin and Pushmeet Kohli
• Kodak Research Lab, Summer 2008, Research Intern with Jiebo Luo
• Intel Research Pittsburgh, Summer 2007, Research Intern with Rahul Sukthankar
• Intel Research Pittsburgh, Summer 2006, Research Intern with Bart Nabbe

I received my master's degree from CMU in 2007, during which I worked with Martial Hebert from the Robotics Institute.

Students Supervised

Graduate Interns and Collaborators

• Abner Guzman Rivera, Ph.D. Advisor: Rob Rutenbar, UIUC
  
• Payman Yadollahpour, Ph.D. Advisor: Greg Shakhnarovich, TTIC
  
• Daozheng Chen, Fall 2011, Ph.D. Advisor: David Jacobs, University of Maryland
  
• Kun Duan, Summer 2011, Ph.D. Advisor: David Crandall, Indiana University

Masters Project Supervised

• Jason Lew, Cornell University
  
• Andrew Mui, Cornell University

Undergraduate Interns

• Tanmay Verma, IIIT-Delhi
  
• Charvi Puri, IIIT-Delhi
• Kevin Tang, Cornell University (now at Stanford)
  

Select Publications (All Publications)

NEW Dhruv Batra, Ashutosh Saxena.
Learning the Right Model: Efficient Max-Margin Learning in Laplacian CRFs.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2012 (CVPR '12).
[ pdf soon ]

NEW Payman Yadollahpour, Dhruv Batra, Greg Shakhnarovich.
M-Best Modes: Diverse M-Best Solutions in MRFs.
Workshop on Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning,
Neural Information Processing Systems 2011 (NIPS '11).
[ pdf ]

NEW Daozheng Chen, Dhruv Batra, William T. Freeman, Micah K. Johnson.
Group Norm for Learning Latent Structural SVMs..
Workshop on Optimization in Machine Learning,
Neural Information Processing Systems 2011 (NIPS '11).
[ pdf ]

NEW Dhruv Batra, Greg Shakhnarovich.
Similarity Sensitive Nonlinear Embeddings.
Workshop on Kernels and Distances for Computer Vision,
International Conference on Computer Vision 2011 (ICCV '11).
[ pdf ]

NEW Dhruv Batra, Adarsh Kowdle, Devi Parikh, Jiebo Luo, Tsuhan Chen.
Interactive Co-segmentation of Objects in Image Collections.
SpringerBriefs in Computer Science, 2011.
[ Springer Page | project page ]
Mini-Book.
[I recommend reading the IJCV '11 preprint since Amazon charges $32 for this version.]

NEW Daniel Tarlow, Dhruv Batra, Pushmeet Kohli, Vladimir Kolmogorov.
Dynamic Tree-Block Coordinate Descent.
International Conference on Machine Learning 2011 (ICML '11).
[ pdf ]

Dhruv Batra, Pushmeet Kohli.
Making the Right Moves: Guiding Alpha-Expansion using Local Primal-Dual Gaps.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2011 (CVPR '11).
[ pdf ]

Andrew Gallagher, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh.
Inference for Order Reduction in Markov Random Fields.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2011 (CVPR '11).
[ pdf ]

Dhruv Batra, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli.
Tighter Relaxations for MAP-MRF Inference:
A Local Primal-Dual Gap based Separation Algorithm.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics 2011 (AISTATS '11).
[ pdf ]

Adarsh Kowdle, Yao-Jen Chen, Dhruv Batra, Tsuhan Chen.
Scribble Based Interactive 3D Reconstruction via Scene Co-segmentation.
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2011 (ICIP '11).
[ pdf | dataset ]
Oral Presentation.

Dhruv Batra, Adarsh Kowdle, Devi Parikh, Jiebo Luo, Tsuhan Chen.
Interactively Co-segmentating Topically Related Images with Intelligent Scribble Guidance.
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2011.
[ Springer Page | Preprint pdf | project page ]
03/2011: Among top downloaded articles from IJCV in the last 30 days.

Adarsh Kowdle, Dhruv Batra, Wen-Chao Chen, Tsuhan Chen.
iModel: Interactive Co-segmentation for Object of Interest 3D Modeling.
Workshop on Reconstruction and Modeling of Large-Scale 3D Virtual Environments,
European Conference on Computer Vision, 2010 (ECCV '10).
[ pdf | dataset ]

Dhruv Batra, Andrew Gallagher, Devi Parikh, Tsuhan Chen.
Beyond Trees: MRF Inference via Outer-Planar Decomposition.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2010 (CVPR '10).
[ pdf ]

Dhruv Batra, Adarsh Kowdle, Devi Parikh, Jiebo Luo, Tsuhan Chen.
iCoseg: Interactive Co-segmentation with Intelligent Scribble Guidance.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2010 (CVPR '10).
[ pdf | project page ]