Monthly Archives: March 2014

Congratulations to Jiangyang Zhang for passing his defense on March 24th. Jiangyang’s PhD thesis title is “Advanced Visual Processing Techniques for Latent Fingerprint Detection and Video Retargeting,” and his thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Sandy Sawchuk and Aichiro Nakano (Outside Member). All committee members were greatly impressed by Jiangyang’s excellent presentation, beautiful slides, and well-organized contents. The two main chapters of his thesis have already been published in IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security and IEEE Trans. on Image Processing. The last chapter will be submitted to a top-ranked conference.

After his graduation, Jiangyang will close up his startup, start looking for jobs and hopefully soon move to San Francisco, a place where he truly feels belong to. In summer 2014, together with some friends he will spend about 2 months biking across America, 3800 miles, from San Francisco to Washington DC. He is doing this not only for achieving his own dream, but also for supporting “Free lunch for Children”, a charity campaign in China (www.mianfeiwucan.org). For more details about his motivation and action plans, please visit: www.danxingdao.org

The MCL Director, Prof. Jay Kuo, has recently been appointed as the Dean’s Professor in Electrical Engineering Systems in recognition of his outstanding academic achievements.

Prof. Kuo said, “This is a great honor by considering that there are so many outstanding faculty members in our Department. I appreciate very much the recognition by Dean Yortsos and the Dean’s Professor Selection Committee for what I have achieved in the last 25 years at USC. Actually, this honor should be shared by all alumni and current students in the Media Communications Lab since I would not be able to do much alone without the dedicated efforts of the whole team. It is my privilege to be able to work with so many talented PhD students.”

Besides scholarly publication, Prof. Kuo is most well-known for his two major contributions. First, Prof. Kuo has guided 120 students to their PhD degrees, which places him as the top advisor in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Second, Prof. Kuo is tightly connected to the IT industry and has received about 150 funded research projects from 60+ industrial companies. His well-trained PhD students are extremely popular in the high tech industry.

Congratulation to Prof. Jay Kuo for this well-deserved honor!

Prof. Wen-Jiin Tsai began her term as Visiting Scholar in Media Communications Lab since August 2013. She received Ph.D and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU). Since 2011, Prof. Wen-Jiin Tsai has been an Associate Professor in NCTU. She took the time to answer some questions about her research.

Could you share your research experience and interest with us?

Before joining NCTU, I have eight years working experience in the industry. I was a senior manager of software department in Zinwell Corporation, and I was in charge of software development for digital TV receivers, which include receiving satellite, cable and terrestrial signals. However, because of family issue, I decided to move to NCTU as an Assistant Professor in 2005, and I became an Associate Professor later in 2011. My research interests include video codec, video streaming, digital TV, and video analysis. In addition, I also teach Digital TV system design and some undergraduate courses in Computer Science department.

During your time as a visiting scholar in MCL, what has been the focus of your work?

Continued from my research field, my research topic here is “perceptual lossless HD/UHD video coding”, which is the same one with another visiting scholar, Dr. Kim. The objective of this project is to amplify the coding efficiency and perceptual quality during compression, so that viewers can receive best visual quality under fixed constraint.

Besides, a graduate student, Qin Huang, in MCL that worked with me in this project has caught my attention; he is responsible and hard-working; I am impressed by his attitude and dedication toward the task assigned to him. It is a great experience to work with such a high-quality student, and I am also amazed by [...]