125 Ideas That Will Shape the Future

125 Ideas That Shape the Future: Technology Spolight Series

As Carnegie Mellon University celebrates 125 years of innovation, the 125 Ideas That Shape the Future: Technology Spotlight Series highlights research-driven technologies that have moved from campus discovery to real-world impact. This series marks both a historic milestone and an opportunity to recognize the ideas—and people—behind innovations shaping the future.

Accelerating Vision Transformers with Adaptive Patch Sizes

The first technology hightlight in the 125 Ideas series corresponds to a publicly available research paper, “Accelerating Vision Transformers with Adaptive Patch Sizes,” authored by PhD student Rohan Choudhury under the co-advisement of Professors Kris M. Kitani and László A. Jeni in the Robotics Institute. The work emerges from the combined research environment of their groups:

• The Cognitive Assistance Laboratory (Kitani) advances computer vision for human-centered and assistive systems, including perception, human activity forecasting, scene understanding, and AI for navigation and autonomy.
• The Computational Behavior (CUBE) Lab (Jeni) focuses on computational behavior science—modeling facial expressions, gaze, head pose, body movement, and social/behavioral signals using multimodal computer vision and machine learning.

Together, these research directions support high-performance, human-aware AI systems capable of interpreting and responding to complex real-world environments.

Creators:

• Rohan Choudhury — Graduate Student, Robotics Institute
• Jung Eun Kim — Visitor, Robotics Institute
• Jinhyung (David) Park — Doctoral Student, Robotics Institute
• Eunho Yang — KAIST
• László A. Jeni — Robotics Institute
• Kris M. Kitani — Robotics Institute

Reaching this milestone highlights the steady flow of novel ideas being shared with CTTEC and the interdisciplinary strength of CMU’s research community. Looking forward to celebrating the 250th!

Help us honor CMU’s legacy of fearless creativity — and be part of the next 125 years of possibility.