In 2014 Fall semester, Wei-Chih Hung will become a new Ph.D. student in MCLab. He received his B.S. and M.S. degree, both in electrical engineering, from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan in 2011 and 2013, respectively. He arrived at USC one week ago, and now we have an interview with him, talking about his background and his thoughts on USC and MCLab.

What were your first impression of USC and MCLab?

USC definitely has a wonderful campus view. The buildings are beautiful and consistent in style. There are trees and grass yards everywhere, and of course I notice the famous fountains in the campus. After the first look on the USC campus, I am so excited that I can pursue my degree in this wonderful place.

As for MCLab, my first impression is that it is really like a big family. People in here are really friendly and willing to help as well as share their own experience, either in academy and living. I have received lots of help since I decided to join MCLab, especially from Professor Kuo, Brian and Joe.

Could you briefly describe your previous research experience?

In the last 2 years of my B.S. program, I was interested in various areas, such as wireless communication, machine learning, video coding, and computer graphics. Since my M.S. program, my research topic mainly focuses on wireless video transmission. I have worked on two projects on wireless video transmission. Both of them tried to adaptively improve video quality over wireless channel with different channel quality. But one tries to improve video quality with video codec parameter selection, and the other proposed a cross-layer video decoding algorithm, exploiting the natural information redundancy with video sequence.

What is your future expectation in MCLab?

The most important thing is that I wish I could find some interesting and challenging research topics. After all, this is the main reason why I want to pursue further study in a Ph.D. program. I really enjoy the feeling that devoting myself to solve a problem using my own knowledge. Currently, I keep open-mind to all the research topics, and I think that computer vision is really interesting and challenging. Second, I would like to keep improving my coding and implementation skills, which is crucial to my future research and career life in my opinion. Moreover, I wish I could excel at English skills including presentation, communication and academic writing. Last but not the least, I expect that I could enjoy a fulfilling life in USC with all the MCLab members.