John Gideon

About Me

John Gideon is a research scientist focused on modeling human cognitive and physical states and creating effective interactions with computers. His current work at Toyota Research Institute includes self-supervised attention understanding and physiological signal estimation from video. He attained his doctorate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2019, with a focus on affect detection from speech. He received his B.S in Electrical Engineering (Magna Cum Laude) and M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2012 and 2013, respectively. His undergraduate and Master's had a strong emphasis on signal processing, embedded systems, and parallel processing. In his free time, John enjoys the outdoors, board games, singing, and travel.

Professional Experience

I have worked in a variety of fields ranging from computer vision, speech affect detection, and cutting edge embedded system design.

Research Scientist

Toyota Research Institute9/19 - present
  • Performed research into driver-facing technologies for safety, including self-supervised gaze estimation and remote heart rate estimation from video.
  • Enabled autonomous vehicle development through simulation scenario design and implementation.

Graduate Research Scientist

University of Michigan9/13 - 8/19
  • Investigated emotion and mood detection from cell-phone speech for the improvement of medical care.
  • Worked on app development, database design, signal processing, clinical feature development, and machine learning.
  • Explored methods to improve classification by reducing the contribution of other acoustic factors including dataset and subject differences.

Intern Research Scientist

Toyota Research Institue6/17 – 9/17
  • Investigated the automatic detection of surprise in drivers.
  • Collected a dataset of people reacting to dashcam footage of crashes.
  • Developed a novel multi-view neural network for surprise detection.

Engineering Researcher

University of Cincinnati Simulation Center4/13 – 8/13
  • Performed research and improved key software as a contractor to Procter and Gamble.
  • Revamped existing R scripts to run simulations orders of magnitude faster.

Engineering Co-op

General Electric Aviation1/10 – 12/12
  • Conducted research and development on a new embedded testing system.
  • Utilized state of the art multicore digital signal processing and FPGA technologies.
  • Reduced testing costs and increased data accuracy versus the previous system.

Selected Publications

  • John Gideon, Shan Su, and Simon Stent. “Unsupervised Multi-View Gaze Representation Learning.” CVPR Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild. 2022. (accepted)
  • John Gideon and Simon Stent. “Estimating Heart Rate from Unlabelled Video.” ICCV Vision for Vitals Workshop and Challenge. 2019. (first place, oral presentation) - View
  • John Gideon* and Simon Stent*. “The Way to my Heart is through Contrastive Learning: Remote Photoplethysmography from Unlabelled Video.” ICCV. 2021. (poster presentation) - View
  • Zhijian Liu, Simon Stent, Jie Li, John Gideon, and Song Han. “LocTex: Learning Data-Efficient Visual Representations from Localized Textual Supervision.” ICCV. 2021. (poster presentation) - View
  • John Gideon, Melvin McInnis, and Emily Mower Provost. “Barking up the Right Tree: Improving Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition with Adversarial Discriminative Domain Generalization (ADDoG).” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. 2019. (accepted) - View
  • John Gideon, Simon Stent, Luke Fletcher. "A Multi-Camera Deep Neural Network for Detecting Elevated Alertness in Drivers." ICASSP. 2018. (poster presentation) - View - Project Page
  • John Gideon, Soheil Khorram, Zakaria Aldeneh, Dimitrios Dimitriadis, and Emily Mower Provost. "Progressive Neural Networks for Transfer Learning in Emotion Recognition." INTERSPEECH. 2017. (oral presentation) - View

Technical Skills

  • Deep learning using Pytorch and Keras
  • Signal processing and acoustical analysis
  • Most familiar with C++, Python, and MATLAB
  • Some experience with Perl, Bash, Java, C, and C#
  • Linux and Windows
  • Git, Unity, Unreal, and OpenCV

Curriculum Vitae