News

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Min Zhang! Here is an interview with Min:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Min Zhang. I graduated from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in June, 2017, and I am currently a M.S. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at USC. About research interests, I would like to work on image and video processing. Researches both on theoretical and application field attract me very much, like architecture researches on CNNs, or application research related to unmanned driving. In my daily life, I like to do some sports, such as playing table tennis, badminton, and running. And I am very interested in finding delicious food in LA.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

The environment of USC is quite good, as there are many green trees and flowers surrounding us. I really enjoy walking on campus. People in USC are all very kind and enthusiastic which impressed me a lot in the past year. I know that image processing of USC is quite good before I come here and I have wanted to study in MCL for a long time. Fortunately, I can be a summer intern student in MCL and I meet many hardworking and passionate students in the lab. I hope I can do well and study more.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I am now working with Prof. Kuo to study further into CNN’s architecture. I hope we can have a better explanation about it. Besides, I am also interested in researches about image and video processing.

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Angela Wang! Here is an interview with Angela:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Angela Wang, I am a rising junior undergraduate studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. I will be joining MCL as a summer intern. Some of my research interests include machine learning and robotics. Apart from academics, I enjoy some hobbies including hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, cooking, baking, and traveling.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

MCL is an impressive community of people filled with bright, motivated, and intelligent people. Everyone is friendly and pleasure to meet. Also, I appreciate the amount of guidance that Professor Kuo seems to give to every member. Furthermore, it is quite amazing to see the amount of women in this lab, as it is quite rare in the STEM field to have about a 50/50 ratio.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

For this summer, I will be working with Bin on a natural language processing project, specifically word embedding. Under the guidance of Professor Kuo and Bin, I am excited to learn a lot and work on an interesting project. And also, I hope to meet many others in the MCL community.

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Saksham Suri! Here is an interview with Saksham:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

Hi, I am Saksham Suri. I am a 3rd year undergraduate at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. I am pursuing my B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering. My research interests lie in the field of machine learning and deep learning. Some of my past projects included Adversarial Learning on Medical Images, Deep Reinforcement Learning on Atari Games and Transferring Intuitions to Improve Classifier Performance with Limited Labeled Data. Other than academics I really like swimming.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

It’s been around 2 weeks since I came to USC and even in this short span I have felt a welcoming and helpful attitude of the students here. Everyone is ready to assist. Due to this kind of an environment I am always comfortable and am able to interact with others. I am also quite amazed by the beauty of the campus and the architecture of the various buildings.

MCL has a tradition of weekly seminars which I think would be really helpful as every week we can learn something new and also interact with the other members. Besides, I have majorly interacted more with my project team. Everyone in the team is approachable and we treat each other like a family. We even went on an outing together which really helped in coming to know each other better.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

My project team consists of Jiali, Yao and Pranav and our main area of focus would be “High-Resolution Face Image Synthesis using MSG”. I am certain that through [...]

The IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics – Taiwan, 2018 was held from May 19th to 21th at National Chung Hsing University. As a grand forum for scholars and professional persons all around the world, ICCE-Taiwan aims to initiate profound discussions on research and discovery in electronics and relevant professional field.

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, gave the opening keynote at this conference. The title of his keynote speech is “RETHINKING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS (CNNS)”. In this speech, Professor Kuo first explained the reasons behind the superior performance of CNNs. Then, he presented 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. His speech was well received by the audience.

After the keynote, Professor Kuo also served as a panelist in the panel discussion with a theme on “Artificial Intelligence on Consumer Electronics for Smart Future”. Besides Professor Kuo, there were two other panelists – Dr. Michael J Chang and Professor Robert Chen-Hao Chang. Dr. Michael Chang is Director General of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Center in Taiwan while Professor Robert Chang is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Professor Robert Chang is also a Program Director of Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design for AI Edge Project under the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan. They discussed the challenges faced by Taiwan IT industry in developing AI related business and products and answered questions from conference attendees.

MCL held a semester-end dinner on Apr. 27 for the closure of Spring 2018. This is also a farewell party for MCL upcoming graduates, Siyang Li, Haiqiang Wang, and Eric Hsieh. The following is from the talk given by our graduates.

Saying: I would like to thank Prof. Kuo’s guidance during these years, and thank all support from MCL family. Studying in MCL and USC would be priceless memory in my life. My suggestion for young generations is that PhD program may be long, but starting doing research as early as possible is essentially important for the whole program. Also, balancing life and work is good for long-term productivity.

Haiqiang: I would like to thank all MCL members. Hope the junior students in MCL can keep our traditions of being friendly and helpful. We learning thinking methods and skills here, and we also learn to offer help here. This is one of the shining points of MCL family.

Eric: I really appreciate the chance here in MCL to work with different people on variant research topics, and I really enjoy participating in MCL routine work for MCL big family. Hope we can keep in touch in long term.

The semester-end dinner and farewell party will become a new MCL tradition. Wish all the best to our new graduates! Fight on!