Computer Sciences Colloquium: From Programming Languages to Programming Systems – Software Development by Refinement

Abstract:

The task of automatic image captioning (i.e. associating images with sentences that describe what is depicted in them) has received a lot of attention over the last couple of years. But how well do these systems actually work? What are the limits of current approaches? In this talk, I will attempt to give an overview of how work in this area has developed. I will also highlight some shortcomings of current approaches, and discuss future directions.

Short bio:

Julia Hockenmaier is associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She works on natural language processing. Her current research focuses on automatic image description, statistical parsing and unsupervised grammar induction.

Her group produced the popular Flickr30K dataset.  She has given tutorials on image description at EACL and CVPR. Julia received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and did postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. She has received an NSF CAREER award was shortlisted for the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation award.