MCLab has a new Ph.D student, Siyang Li. Let’s give Siyang a warm welcome! She received B.S. degree from the University of Hong Kong this June. She decided to join USC MCLab to pursue her Ph.D degree beginning from this Fall semester. She was interviewed by MCLab.

What were your first impression of USC and our lab?

USC has a large and beautiful campus. Viterbi School is really a big family and I have met a lot of new students during my first week here. The volunteers were so nice and helpful that I got the paperwork done easily.

MCLab is also a big family and the group mates are friendly and helpful. Yuzhuo helped with housing issues and Sudeng gave me information about academic work. I really appreciate that. Prof. Kuo emphasized teamwork in the first meeting, which I found impressive. I chatted with some group mates and I think we are going to take advantage of a large group – seeking advice from each other and exchanging ideas.

Could you talk about your research interest?

At present, I think I still keep an open mind in the field of computer vision. I would love to try different topics in the first few months and it is my honor to have Sudeng as my mentor. The starting point would be security enhancement in video surveillance. Currently video surveillance is mainly used for investigation after accidents. However, if the computer can automatically detect events such as fighting or shooting, and inform the security staff on time, accidents, especially fatalities may be prevented. Therefore, at the very beginning, I will mainly focus on the event detection and maybe we will build the database with the video provided by USC surveillance [...]