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The first International Conference on Data Intelligence and Security (ICDIS-2018) was held at South Padre Island (SPI), Texas, USA, from April 9-10, 2018. The conference was organized by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Key people in attendance were from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies focused on data intelligence and security.

Dr. Parwinder Grewal, UTRGV executive vice president for Research, Graduate Studies, and New Program Development, welcomed attendees to the conference in the open ceremony held on April 9 (Monday) morning. After his opening remarks, MCL Director, Professor Jay Kuo, gave the first keynote speech on the topic, “Why and Why Not Convolutional Neural Networks.” The abstract of his talk is given below.

“The superior performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been demonstrated in many applications such as image classification, detection, and processing. Yet, the CNN solution has its own weaknesses such as robustness against perturbation, scalability against the class number and portability among different datasets. Furthermore, CNN’s working principle remains mysterious. In this talk, I will first explain the reasons behind the superior performance of CNNs. Then, I will present an alternative solution, which is motivated by CNNs yet allows rigorous and transparent mathematical treatment, based on a data-driven Saak (Subspace approximation with augmented kernels) transform. The kernels of the Saak transform are derived from the second-order statistics of inputs in a one-pass feedforward way. Neither data labels nor backpropagation is needed in kernel determination. The pros and cons of CNNs and multi-stage Saak transforms are compared.”

The South Padre Island (http://www.myspi.org/) is a tropical island located in the Mexico Gulf. It is famous for beautiful beaches, warm Gulf waters, fishing, boating, bird watching, and shopping. [...]

We are so happy to welcome a new Master’s member of MCL, Charan Shettyhalli Guruswamy. Here is an interview with Charan :
1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?
I am Charan, a new grad student who joined EE dept in spring 2018. I love to work hard and think more. I got attracted to image processing and machine learning during my undergrad. Starting then I have pursued computer vision and the math behind it. My previous research included face & object detection and recognition, biometrics, NLP, optimization, ML and deep learning. I have a passion to play with numbers, and I see images as just matrices. I am not a big fan of neural networks, I like convolutions more than deep learning. I have interest in designing new transforms for data, I hope to research on scene understanding and video completion.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?
MCL is a group filled with image processing passionates. Every one of them has their own beautiful perspectives in analyzing the images, and their unique works enthrall me. There is a lot of math, analysis, and visualization here, that’s what I like in MCL. Weekly sessions by doctoral students help in understanding the new topics in the IP field, thus triggering motivation in all. The rich MCL alumni and community guiding the current MCL candidates is ideal for career growth. MCL helps in breaking our shell and surpass our limits.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?
My goal is to design a transforms which can extract and select features from any data. I want to learn how to model this transforms. I want to join the peer community of [...]