Hi, I am Alex Falcon. I am a Post-doc researcher at the University of Udine (AI Lab). I completed my PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics, jointly held at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Technology of Vision - TeV) and University of Udine, under the supervision of Oswald Lanz (Free University of Bolzano) and Giuseppe Serra (University of Udine). My main research focus is currently focused towards multimedia, video and language understanding, and deep learning. Before that, I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Udine. Specifically, during my Master’s I started working with AI, machine learning, and deep learning with a focus on Predictive Maintenance.

E-mail: falcon.alex ‘at’ spes.uniud.it / Google Scholar / Github / LinkedIn / CV

News

[click for previous years]
  • 2023
  • 2022
    • one paper (pdf) accepted as an Oral at AIABI@AIxIA 2022!
    • one paper accepted at Computers in Industry! code
    • one paper accepted as an Oral at ACM MM 2022! code
    • I delivered two talks at University of Bolzano: "Data-driven approaches for the Remaining Useful Life Estimation problem" and "Learning video retrieval models with relevance-aware online mining"
    • I was featured in the FBK magazine (italian)!
    • our solution (report) got (trophy emoji) 1st place (trophy emoji) in the EPIC-Kitchens-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval Challenge @ CVPR 2022!
    • I attended the fantastic International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) in Scicli, Italy and presented a poster titled "Relevance-aware Online Mining for Video Retrieval"!
    • one paper accepted as an Oral at ICMR 2022! code
    • one paper accepted as an Oral at ICIAP 2021! code
    • I delivered a seminar on "Data-driven approaches for the remaining useful life estimation problem" as the speaker at FBK!
  • 2021
    • our solution (report) got 3rd place in the EPIC-Kitchens-100 Action Recognition Challenge @ CVPR 2021!
    • I completed the "Fundamentals of Deep Learning for Multi-GPUs" course held by NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute!
    • we organized the VIQA workshop @ ICPR 2020 (later merged into the VTIUR workshop)!
  • 2020
  • 2019
    • one paper accepted at IRCDL 2019!
    • October 2019: I started my PhD under the supervision of Oswald Lanz and Giuseppe Serra!
    • July 2019: I successfully completed the Master's Degree in Computer Science cum laude!

Main projects and lines of research

Text-Video Retrieval

Topics: multimedia, cross-modal understanding, vision and language

Overview of the algorithm

TL;DR:: State-of-the-art video retrieval systems are obtained with contrastive learning techniques. These leverage video-caption annotated pairs to automatically learn models capable of ranking videos based on their relevance to input textual queries. However, contrastive learning techniques enforce constraints at training time which neglect that multiple videos may be relevant for the same caption, and vice versa. In this line of research, we focus on the importance of introducing semantic knowledge into the training process to overcome these limitations. The results obtained confirm our observations and hypotheses, and the learning strategies we proposed effectively overcome them (e.g., from about 36% nDCG to almost 60% on the challenging EPIC-Kitchens-100 dataset).

Selected publications/endeavors
  1. Semantics for vision-and-language understanding.
    A. Falcon
    PhD Thesis, 2023.
    [pdf]
  2. A Feature-space Multimodal Data Augmentation Technique for Text-video Retrieval.
    A. Falcon, G. Serra, O. Lanz. ACM MM 2022. [pdf]
  3. UniUD-FBK-UB-UniBZ Submission to the EPIC-Kitchens-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval Challenge 2022. (ranked (trophy emoji) ranked 1st (trophy emoji))
    A. Falcon, G. Serra, S. Escalera, O. Lanz. EPIC@CVPR 2022. [pdf]
  4. Relevance-based margin for contrastively-trained video retrieval models.
    A. Falcon, S. Sudhakaran, G. Serra, S. Escalera, O. Lanz. ACM ICMR 2022.[pdf]
  5. Learning video retrieval models with relevance-aware online mining.
    A. Falcon, G. Serra, O. Lanz. ICIAP 2021. [pdf]

Ranking complex 3D scenes (Metaverses , Apartments )

topics: multimedia, cross-modal understanding, vision and language

Overview of the algorithm

TL;DR::

Selected publications/endeavors
  1. Paving the Way for Personalized Museums Tours in the Metaverse.
    A. Falcon, B. Portelli, A. Abdari, G. Serra. IRCDL 2024. [pdf]
  2. A Language-based solution to enable Metaverse Retrieval.
    A. Abdari, A. Falcon, G. Serra. MMM 2024. [pdf]
  3. FArMARe: a Furniture-Aware Multi-task methodology for Recommending Apartments based on the user interests.
    A. Abdari, A. Falcon, G. Serra. CV4Metaverse@ICCV 2023. [pdf]
  4. Metaverse Retrieval: Finding the Best Metaverse Environment via Language. A. Abdari, A. Falcon, G. Serra.
    MMIR@ACM MM 2023. [pdf]

Video Question Answering

topics: multimedia, cross-modal understanding, vision and language

Overview of the algorithm

TL;DR::

Selected publications/endeavors
  1. Video question answering supported by a multi-task learning objective.
    A. Falcon, G. Serra, O. Lanz. Multimedia Tools and Applications 82 (25), 38799-38826. 2023. [pdf]
  2. Data augmentation techniques for the video question answering task.
    A. Falcon, G. Serra, O. Lanz. EPIC@ECCV 2020. [pdf]

Remaining Useful Life Estimation

topics: predictive maintenance

Overview of the algorithm

TL;DR: We deal with the problem of estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of mechanical engines by using neural sequence models. In particular, we introduced to this field of research a neural model inspired from Neural Turing Machines.

Selected publications/endeavors
  1. Neural turing machines for the remaining useful life estimation problem.
    A. Falcon, G. D’Agostino, O. Lanz, G. Brajnik, C. Tasso, G. Serra. Computers in Industry 143, 103762. 2022. [pdf]
  2. Estimating the Remaining Useful Life via Neural Sequence Models: a Comparative Study.
    G. D'Agostino, A. Falcon, O. Lanz, G. Brajnik, C. Tasso, G. Serra. AIABI@AIxIA 2022. [pdf]
  3. A Dual-Stream architecture based on Neural Turing Machine and Attention for the Remaining Useful Life Estimation problem. A. Falcon, G. D'Agostino, G. Serra, G. Brajnik, C. Tasso.
    PHME 2020. [pdf]
  4. A neural turing machine-based approach to remaining useful life estimation.
    A. Falcon, G. D'Agostino, G. Serra, G. Brajnik, C. Tasso. ICPHM 2020. [pdf]
  5. Remaining Useful Life Estimation using LSTM Networks and Attentive mechanisms.
    A. Falcon
    MSc Thesis, 2019.

Service

  • Proceedings Chair: IRCDL 2023
  • Local Organization Chair: EQAI 2024, 2023, AIxIA 2022
  • Organizer: VIQA 2020/VTIUR 2020
  • Journal Reviewing: IJCV, IEEE TMM, IET Computer Vision, ACM TOMM, IEEE Trans Hum Mach Syst.
  • Conference Reviewing: ECCV 2024, ACM MM 2024, ACM MM 2023, CCISP 2023, IRCDL 2023, ICIAP 2023, ICPR 2022, ICIAP 2021, EMNLP 2021, ICPR 2020.
  • Co-Supervision: 3 Bachelor and 5 Master students of Computer Science Degree or IoT, Big Data, and ML Degree at UniUD on topics related to Video&Language and Predictive Maintenance.
    • Gallegos Carvajal Ian Marco, MSc. Enhancing text-to-textured 3D mesh generation with training-free adaptation for textual-visual consistency using spatial constraints and quality assurance: a case study on Text2Room. 2024.
    • Rodaro Edoardo, BSc. Rilevamento del flusso di materiale su nastro trasportatore attraverso le reti neurali. 2023.
    • Bianchi Carlo, MSc. L'Intelligenza Artificiale a supporto del metaverso. 2023.
    • Bruni Pierfrancesco, MSc. Circulant matrices lead to an improved baseline for question-driven video moment localization. 2022. (published at IRCDL 2023!)
    • De Martin Federica, MSc. Ricerca di un nuovo modello video e transfer learning nell’ambito del Multi-Instance video-text retrieval. 2022.
    • De Reggi Paolo, MSc. Generazione automatica di domande e risposte per il problema del video question answering. 2021.
    • Ferroli Daniele, BSc. Implementazione di un sistema di Video Question Answering. 2020.
    • Rosso Giovanni, BSc. Utilizzo di reti neurali convolutive per la manutenzione predittiva. 2020.