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