Abhijat Biswas

abhijat [at] cmu [dot] edu

Hey there! I'm Abhijat, a PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Henny Admoni on using driver eye-gaze information to inform active sensor policies for safer autonomous and assisted driving. I worked with Henny and Aaron Steinfeld, on social navigation and related topics for Human-Robot Interaction during my Masters.

Previously, I've spent time teaching neural nets to recognize free hand sketches at IISc Bangalore. I've also worked on using temporal smoothness in videos as supervision for neural networks at Cardiff University. I went to IIT Guwahati for ECE.

CV / G Scholar / Semantic Scholar / Github

Ongoing work

Dynamics of peripheral vision during driving
Right after saccades (eye movements), human peripheral vision degrades. How can driver assistance systems incorporate this knowledge to provide intelligent assistance when driver peripheral awareness is low?

Attention during critical driving situations
What does eye gaze reveal about driver situational awareness (SA) during safety-critical driving situations? How can we predict when SA does not cover task relevant stimuli and initiate appropriate interventions?

Research

(*) denotes equal contribution

	DReyeVR: Democratizing Virtual Reality Driving Simulation for Behavioural & Interaction Research G Silvera, A Biswas, and H Admoni ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2022, Short Contributions Track [arXiv] [Code] [Video] We open-source DReyeVR, our VR-based driving simulator built with human-centric research in mind. It's based on CARLA -- if CARLA is for algorithmic drivers, DReyeVR is for humans. The hardware setup is affordable for many academic labs, costing under 5000 USD.
	SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framework for Evaluating Social Navigation A Biswas, A Wang, G Silvera, A Steinfeld, and H Admoni ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI) 2021, Special Issue: Test Methods for Human-Robot Teaming Performance Evaluations [arXiv] [Simulator] [Baselines] We introduce SocNavBench, a simulation framework for evaluating social navigation algorithms in a consistent and interpretable manner. It has a simulator with photo-realistic capabilities, curated social navigation scenarios grounded in real-world pedestrian data, and a suite of metrics that is auto-computed. Try it out to evaluate your own social navigation algorithms!
	Examining the Effects of Anticipatory Robot Assistance on Human Decision Making B Newman, A Biswas, S Ahuja, S Girdhar, and H Admoni International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2020 [Paper] [Video] Does preemptive robot assistance change human decision making? We show in an experiment (N=99), that people's decision making in a selection task does change in response to anticipatory robot assistance, but predicting the direction of change is difficult.
	Human Torso Pose Forecasting in the Real World A Biswas, H Admoni, and A Steinfeld Multi-modal Perception and Control Workshop, Robotics:Science and Systems (RSS) 2018 [Paper] [More results]
	SketchParse: Towards Rich Descriptions for Poorly Drawn Sketches using Multi-Task Hierarchical Deep Networks RK Sarvadevabhatla, I Dwivedi, A Biswas, S Manocha, and R V Babu ACM Multimedia Conference (ACM MM) 2017 [arXiv] [Code] Can we use neural networks to semantically parse freehand sketches? We show this is possible by "sketchifying" natural images to generate training data and employing a graphical model for generating descriptions.
	Development of an Assistive Stereo Vision System T Shankar, A Biswas, and V Arun International Convention on Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology, (i-CREATe) 2015 [Paper] [News]

Other projects

	First-order Meta-Learned Initialization for Faster Adaptation in Deep Reinforcement Learning Abhijat Biswas, Shubham Agrawal [Report] First-derivative approximations to meta-learning updates perform just as well as second-derivative ones. Demonstrated on RL tasks
	Socially compliant path planning Abhijat Biswas, Ting-Che Lin, and Sean Wang [Report] [Code] [Video] RTAA + Social-LSTM based social navigation*
	Automatic Extrinsic Calibration of Stereo Camera and 3D LiDAR Abhijat Biswas, Aashi Manglik [Poster] We implement a method for estimation of MAV poses and dynamic parameters during flight.

Last updated: Feb 2022

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