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MCL Director, Professor Kuo, was invited by Korean National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) to deliver a keynote speech at the Grand Cloud Conference, Seoul, Korea on Dec. 3, 2019. The title of Professor Kuo’s talk was “AI Cloud Strategy for Government and Industry”. Here is the abstract.

There have been many successful artificial intelligence (AI) stories in the last decade due to big data analytics and the resurgence of neural-network-based deep learning. For clarity, I would like to give my own definition about AI. That is, AI is not about competing with humans in terms of intelligence but an advanced form of “automation”, which leverages both data and domain knowledge to achieve domain-specific tasks more effectively. Then, I will discuss the AI deployment strategy. It is centered around “smart environments” such as smart homes, smart cities, etc. We can leverage sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G infrastructures to acquire a large amount of data for better decision making. After that, I will mention three R&D opportunities: 1) explainable AI, 2) integrated rule-based/data-driven methodology and 3) federated learning. For the first topic, AI is not necessarily dependent upon deep learning, which is a black box. We are working on an alternative approach, called Successive Subspace Learning (SSL), to solve the big data problem at USC. SSL is mathematically transparent and expandable depending on the training data sizes and classes. It has great potential. For the second topic, I want to emphasize that big data is helpful but not sufficient by itself alone. It is more powerful to have an integration of the “rule-based” and the “data-driven” approaches. The integration allows better generalizability and robustness. The third topic is concerned with data-driven model training without [...]

Dr. Sachin Chachada, a former MCL alumnus, and Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo received the 2019 Sadaoki Furui Paper Award at the open ceremony of the 2019 APSIPA ASC held in Lanzhou, China, on November 19 for their paper below:
Sachin Chachada and C.-C. Jay Kuo, “Environmental sound recognition: a survey,” Published online: 15 December 2014, e14, APSIPA Trans. on Signal and Information Processing.
The paper has been cited by 107 in Google Scholar, the number of downloads in 2019 (to end of Sept.) is 1523. The abstract of the paper is given below.
Although research in audio recognition has traditionally focused on speech and music signals, the problem of environmental sound recognition (ESR) has received more attention in recent years. Research on ESR has significantly increased in the past decade. Recent work has focused on the appraisal of non-stationary aspects of environmental sounds, and several new features predicated on non-stationary characteristics have been proposed. These features strive to maximize their information content pertaining to signal’s temporal and spectral characteristics. Furthermore, sequential learning methods have been used to capture the long-term variation of environmental sounds. In this survey, we will offer a qualitative and elucidatory survey on recent developments. It includes four parts: (i) basic environmental sound-processing schemes, (ii) stationary ESR techniques, (iii) non-stationary ESR techniques, and (iv) performance comparison of selected methods. Finally, concluding remarks and future research and development trends in the ESR field will be given.

Recently, Professor Kuo and his students at MCL proposed a new machine learning methodology called successive subspace learning (SSL). The methodology has been widely adopted in MCL to solve image processing and computer vision problems. In 3D domain, we have observed a great success in point cloud classification task. In the PointHop paper, we develop an explainable machine learning method for point cloud classification. The classification baseline is composed by four PointHop units, we construct the local-to-global attribute building process and use saab transform to control the dimension growth in each unit. We compare the test performance on ModelNet40 with the state-of-the-art methods, our method obtains comparable performance with the others while demands much less training time. For instance, PointNet costs about 5 hours to train, while ours only takes 20 minutes to train on the same dataset. The advantages of the methodology are very clear: interpretable and much less computation complexity.

The success in point cloud classification encourages us to go deeper in 3D domain. Therefore, we further look at the segmentation task which needs to assign label to each point in the point cloud. Referring to the common image segmentation network, we use the point cloud classification baseline as an encoder and add a decoder to complete segmentation. After building local neighboring regions and extracting local attributes from neighboring points in the encoder, the features are interpolated back to finest scale layer by layer with skip connections between same scales in the decoder. Also, saab transform is adopted between layers as feedfoward convolution to control the rapid growth of the feature dimension.

Our method also has the advantage of task-agnostic ability. Specifically, by learning the parameters in a one-pass manner, our [...]

We are so happy to welcome a new undergraduate member of MCL, Eric Huang. Here is an interview with Eric:

Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

Hi, my name is Eric Huang and I’m a current senior studying computer science at USC. I’ve been interested in research ever since I started college and the MCL is a lab I’m honored to have been able to join. I previously worked in biomedical and mechanical engineering labs, but machine learning is the field I am most interested in. My research focus is on facial classification and verification, particularly in studying how to streamline the training process. But I think that every new development in AI is incredible and I hope to be able to learn and understand the many aspects.

What is your impression about MCL and USC?

My impression of USC after three years is that the school is amazing. There are countless intelligent students and professors that form a productive and supportive network. I see the MCL as the pinnacle of what USC can achieve. Everyone in the MCL is highly driven, intelligent, and passionate and I hope to live up to the same standard.

What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

My expectation and plan in the MCL are to learn, grow, and hopefully contribute. I plan to study hard and learn everything I can in order to be able to meaningfully help out. I expect to learn a lot from the lab members and to work hard supporting them. And I hope that I am able to form lasting connections with all the talented people I get to work with.

We are so happy to welcome a new graduate member of MCL, Xiou Ge. Here is an interview with Xiou:

Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Xiou Ge. I’m a first year PhD student in Electrical Engineering. I’m from Harbin, China. After completing my middle school education in China, I was awarded a scholarship and spend my high school years in Singapore. I obtained my bachelor’s degree with highest honors and the master’s degree, both in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, I interned at Apple in Cupertino and worked on EDA tool development, and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and did computational creativity research. My current research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision.

What is your impression about MCL and USC?

Everyone I met in MCL has been very nice and willing to help each other. The atmosphere is very relaxed and people interact with each other just like family members. Yet everybody works very hard and I can feel the energy which motivates me to work harder. I think MCL has the conducive environment for me to become a successful graduate student. USC offers a very different college experience from my previous one. Located in the middle of downtown LA, the school offers plenty of opportunities for students to experience and learn from the outside world. Collaborations with researchers from other institutions and other parts of the world are frequent and convenient. The school also makes substantial investment in education and allows students to learn from and do research with world-class faculty and experts in different research fields. 

What is your future expectation and plan in [...]