Austin McEver

PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Graduate Student Researcher in Vision Research Lab

Interests: weak supervision, partial supervision, computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, recommender systems

Contact: mcever ⓐt ucsb.edu

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. Fall 2017 - Present

  • MS in Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. Class of 2021

  • BS in Computer Science at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Class of 2017

Professional Experience

  • June 2021 - September 2021: Facebook, Software Engineer Intern - Machine Learning

    • Improved Facebook Watch and Facebook Video Chaining modeling by increasing performance on low traffic video types e.g, Facebook Live

    • Enhanced Facebook video recommendation model architecture, driving Facebook video recommendation performance metrics

  • Fall 2018 - Present: Vision Research Lab, Graduate Student Researcher

  • Summer 2018: Mayachitra Inc, Computer Vision Research Intern

    • Collaborated with senior researchers to participate in the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) xView detection challenge in overhead satellite imagery

    • Experimented with adapting the YOLOv3 convolutional neural network to optimize for the DIUx's xView public dataset

  • Summer 2017: OSIsoft LLC, Research Intern

    • Connected OSISoft's PI System data infrastructure to Esri ArcGIS to facilitate a real time data visualization of CURENT's real time power grid simulation

    • Compared the OSISoft PI System and Esri ArcGIS visualization with custom Python visualization software developed during time with CURENT

  • January 2016 - May 2017: CURENT UTK, Undergraduate Researcher

    • Created custom visualizations for power system simulations using wxPython

    • Traveled to Southeast University in Nanjing, China to assist in developing a genetic algorithm to find solutions to microgrid power system simulation stability issues

Current Projects

Marine Applied Research and Exploration (MARE) has collected hundreds of hours of video using their unmanned, underwater, remote-operated vehicles (ROVs). In order to better survey and understand life in California's costal waters, MARE has annotated each video with species and substrate labels.

My implementation of a Context-Driven Detector enables detection, tracking, and counting of invertebrate species while simultaneously generating temporal labels for substrates present in the MARE's videos as demonstrated on the soon-to-be public Dataset for Underwater Invertebrate Analysis (DUSIA).

Habitat Recognition in Underwater Vehicle Video

As a first step toward creating the Context-Driven Detector, I first implemented a method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of generating temporal labels for DUSIA. A ResNet-based classification models classifies the video frame by frame, and a median filter temporally smoothes the classification results.

Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Images of Sessile Organisms

The Marine Science Institute at UCSB regularly photograph the sea floor near the Channel Islands and annotate their data using point labels, indicating the species present in a small group of pixels. I adapted a weakly supervised segmentation network designed for natural images to work with their data. A first draft of this work is available on arxiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.05615.

BisQue

BisQue is an open source platform for storing, visualizing, organizing, and analyzing images in the cloud, largely maintained by UCSB’s Vision Research Lab. My responsibilities include software engineering tasks such as integrating Keycloak user authentication, developing machine learning modules for public use, assisting with Docker issues, and advising undergraduate research students who participate in the project.

Deep Superpixel Features

Superpixels refer to an over segmentation used to group pixels into homogenous regions based on some criteria. They have numerous applications, but describing them computationally is not as straightforward or powerful as it could be. I am working to adapt new convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that generate superpixels to simultaneously generate deep features for those superpixels.

Graduate Courses

  • Digital Image Processing

  • Computer Imaging

  • Information Theory

  • Matrix Analysis

  • Machine Learning

  • Pattern Recognition

  • Computer Vision

  • Topics in Cybersecurity

  • Operating Systems

Skills / Frameworks

  • Python

  • Pytorch

  • OpenCV

  • Scikit-Learn

  • Ubuntu / Linux

  • Git

  • Docker

  • Scikit-image

  • TensorFlow

  • Java

  • C,C++

  • MATLAB

  • HTML

  • Javascript

  • tmux

  • vim