September 26, 2022
Assistant Professor Gedas Bertasius has been conferred a 2021 Sony Faculty Innovation Award in Information Technology. With this award, Bertasius will fund a project aimed at leveraging multimodal information to improve video representation learning.
The Sony Faculty Innovation Award is a highly prestigious, globally recognized award which Bertasius is the first UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member to receive in several years. Bertasius is one of ten reported award winners as of September 2022.
Bertasius’ research is concerned with computer vision and machine learning, and this project succinctly describes an application at the intersection of the two. Bertasius sets out to utilize the multimodal information with which videos on the Internet are equipped to enhance video representation learning. This project employs complementary cues from video and audio streams (such as speech transcriptions and metadata text descriptions) to enhance detailed textual captions. By taking on video representation learning through the lens of natural language generation, Bertasius aims to make training more data-efficient and accurate.
The Sony Faculty Innovation Award encourages collaboration between faculty members and Sony to bridge the industrial applications of highly anticipated research.
This award is another addition to Bertasius’ long list of accomplishments in 2022, including a recent gift from Meta and successful conference submissions to the European Conference on Computer Vision and the Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia.
Read more about the Sony Faculty Innovation Award here.