Feb 18 - Boston AI, ML and Computer Vision Meetup
Details
Join the Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.
Pre-registration is mandatory to clear security.
Date and Location
Feb 18, 2026
5:30 - 8:30 PM EST
Microsoft Research Lab – New England (NERD) at MIT
Deborah Sampson Conference Room
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142
SNAP: Towards Segmenting Anything in Any Point Cloud
Segmenting objects in 3D point clouds is a core problem in 3D scene understanding and scalable data annotation. In this talk, I will present SNAP: Segmenting Anything in Any Point Cloud, a unified framework for interactive point cloud segmentation that supports both point-based and text-based prompts across indoor, outdoor, and aerial domains. SNAP is trained jointly on multiple heterogeneous datasets and achieves strong cross-domain generalization through domain-adaptive normalization. The model enables both spatially prompted instance segmentation and text-prompted panoptic and open-vocabulary segmentation directly on point clouds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SNAP matches or outperforms domain-specific methods on a wide range of zero-shot benchmarks.
About the Speaker
Hanhui Wang is a first-year Ph.D. student at the Visual Intelligence Lab at Northeastern University. His research centers on 3D scene understanding, with recent work on point cloud segmentation and structured representations, and broader interests in generation and reasoning for multimodal 3D/4D perception.
Culturally Adaptive AI
AI can now generate videos, images, speech, and text that are almost indistinguishable from human-created content. As generative AI systems become more sophisticated, we end up questioning our feeds' credibility and whether they're even real. There is a need, now more than ever, to develop models that help humans distinguish between real and AI-generated content. How can we shape the next generation of AI models to be more explainable, safe, and creative? How can we make these models teach humans about different cultures, bridging the gap between human and AI collaboration?
This talk highlights emerging techniques and the future of AI that will improve trust in generative AI systems by integrating insights from multimodality, reasoning, and factuality. Tomorrow's AI won't just process data and generate content; rather, we imagine it will amplify our creativity, extend our compassion, and help us rediscover what makes us fundamentally human.
About the Speaker
Anku Rani is a doctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investigating machine learning models for video generation along with projects at the intersection of natural language processing and human-computer interaction. Her research spans multimodality, mathematical reasoning, attribution, and fact verification, with work published in leading AI conferences.
Data Foundations for Vision-Language-Action Models
Model architectures get the papers, but data decides whether robots actually work. This talk introduces VLAs from a data-centric perspective: what makes robot datasets fundamentally different from image classification or video understanding, how the field is organizing its data (Open X-Embodiment, LeRobot, RLDS), and what evaluation benchmarks actually measure. We'll examine the unique challenges such as temporal structure, proprioceptive signals, and heterogeneity in embodiment, and discuss why addressing them matters more than the next architectural innovation.
About the Speaker
Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.
Better Together: Leveraging Unpaired Multimodal Data for Stronger Unimodal Models
Traditional multimodal learners find unified representations for tasks like visual question answering, but rely heavily on paired datasets. However, an overlooked yet potentially powerful question is: can one leverage auxiliary unpaired multimodal data to directly enhance representation learning in a target modality? We introduce UML: Unpaired Multimodal Learner, a modality-agnostic training paradigm in which a single model alternately processes inputs from different modalities while sharing parameters across them. This design exploits the assumption that different modalities are projections of a shared underlying reality, allowing the model to benefit from cross-modal structure without requiring explicit pairs. Theoretically, under linear data-generating assumptions, we show that unpaired auxiliary data can yield representations strictly more informative about the data-generating process than unimodal training. Empirically, we show that using unpaired data from auxiliary modalities---such as text, audio, or images---consistently improves downstream performance across diverse unimodal targets such as image and audio. Our project page is here.
About the Speaker
Sharut Gupta is a fourth-year Ph.D student at MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. Phillip Isola and Prof. Stefanie Jegelka. Prior to this, she completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Computing at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT Delhi), during which she worked with Prof. Yoshua Bengio on her thesis. She has also spent time at Meta SuperIntelligence Labs (Meta AI), and Google DeepMind.
Neural Radiance Fields for Image Verification
We propose an image verification method that embeds physical refraction as an authenticity signature. To verify an image, we compare it to a pixel-aligned reconstruction derived from the refraction and flag inconsistencies. Manipulations are detectable because maintaining geometric consistency with the refractive object is difficult without knowing its refractive properties. Unlike prior work that relies on simple analytic refractions and slow per-scene NeRF optimization, we train a compact, scene-agnostic neural refraction field that models complex geometries and enables instant, high-fidelity reconstruction for detection and localization.
About the Speaker
Sage Simhon completed her BSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her MEng in Computer Science at MIT. She is interested in the intersection of physics, AI, and computer vision. She currently works on AI for physics simulation at Pasteur Labs.