The 9th Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Annual Summit and Conference (ASC), or APSIPA ASC 2017 in short, was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from Dec. 11-14, 2017. Research conducted at MCL has received a lot of attention at this conference.
First, MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo was the keynote speaker on December 14. The title of his talk is “Why Deep Learning Networks Work So Well?” His talk was very well attended. He received enthusiastic feedback from the audience. Although deep learning is very hot these days, there is little theoretical justification. Professor Kuo’s keynote provided insights into the working principle behind CNNs and also pointed out ways to improve its shortcomings by introducing the Saak transform.
Second, two MCL papers received honors at the conference. The paper entitled with “Understanding CNN via Deep Feature Analysis” by Hao Xu, Yueru Chen, Ruiyuan Lin and C.-C. Jay Kuo received the best paper award. The poster presentation on “Age/Gender Classification with Whole-Component Convolutional Neural Networks” (by Chun-Ting Huang, Yueru Chen, Ruiyuan Lin and C.-C. Jay Kuo) won the Springer best poster book prize. Both Hao Xu and Chun-Ting Huang were MCL alumni. Hao Xu is currently working at Google while Chun-Ting is a research engineer at Qualcomm.