(Oct 18) ThirdEye: Visual Assist for Grocery Shopping

Shopping is widely considered as a relaxing leisure activity. However, grocery shopping can be a frustrating experience for those with visual impairment. While getting to a grocery shop itself is not as much of a challenge for them, locating and picking the items in the grocery shelf becomes a task as challenging as picking a needle from the haystack. Imagine picking up five items for your dinner recipe from a typical grocery store in the US that carries around 35,000 unique items and can have more than 30 aisles spanning 45,000 square meters. This talk will showcase synergistic advances in algorithms, architectures and interface design for assisting those with visual impairment to do shopping. We will specifically focus on new non-boolean hardware approaches to significantly impact the energy-efficiency of the overall system.

Biography: Vijay Narayanan is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the director of the NSF Expeditions-in-Computing Program on Visual Cortex on Silicon and a thrust leader for the DARPA-MARCO LEAST Center. He has published more than 400 papers and won several awards in recognition of his research in power-aware systems, embedded systems and computer architecture. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. He has been seving as Editor-In-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of ICs and Systems.