News

We would like to say congratulations to Dr. Eddy Wu for graduating from USC/MCL. He is going to join a start-up company in Seattle in 2018 February. He prepared a message about his job hunting experience to share with all MCL members, Alums and friends. We wish him the very best in his career at Magvii Research.

After graduating from MCL, I’ve decided to join Megvii Research USA as a senior research scientist. Megvii is a fast-growing unicorn startup company based in Beijing, China focusing on AI technologies. It is especially famous for its face recognition technology (known as Face++). Megvii research USA is a new branch located at Redmond WA, and is directed by Dr. Jue Wang (http://www.juew.org/). The whole Megvii research is led by Dr. Jian Sun (http://www.jiansun.org/).

Joining a startup company is always risky, but I have a strong desire becoming part of Megvii for several reasons. First, I like fast-paced environments, and I enjoy the challenges of bringing latest computer vision and deep learning technologies to real-world applications. Secondly, Megvii has shown great successes in certain AI fields with their talented teams, and signs have shown that China may have potential to lead in AI development in the foreseeable future. Another reason is that my new role in Megvii also has a great match with my researches in MCL as well as my 6-year industrial experiences prior to my PhD study.

Job hunting is an exhausted process. I applied for, and interviewed with different types companies including big name ones, industrial research labs, and startup companies in different stages. I only targeted computer vision or deep learning roles, with different types (engineer/scientist) and levels. Although I got interview invitations from many companies, eventually [...]

We are so happy to welcome a new Ph.D. member of MCL, Sibo Song. Here is an interview with  Sibo :
1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Sibo Song. I am currently a Ph.D. student at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and I received my Bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University(ZJU) in Automation. My research interests include activity recognition, multi-modal data analysis, and deep learning.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

I know MCL from Prof. Kuo when he visited Singapore and presented his recent works on Saak transform. Through the talking, I knew that MCL is one big family of many intelligent people who are willing to offer their help and enthusiastic about doing research. I just can’t wait to join MCL and meet them all. 

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

During the exchange, I plan to receive research training and investigate Saak transform on various applications such as generative model and adversarial attacks in image and video processing. Also, I hope that I can make more friends here in MCL and learn together with them.
 

We are so happy to welcome a new Master’s member of MCL, Zhaolei Xiao. Here is an interview with Zhaolei.

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

My name is Zhaolei Xiao, come from the capital city of China, Beijing. I’m focusing on signal and image processing and this is my last semester in master’s program in USC. I like dealing with multimedia data: compress files, denoise a signal, and solve inpainting problem, etc., all of them give me a lot of fun. Moreover, after acquiring knowledge in machine learning field, like convolutional neural networks, building classifiers, I find it a new world to explore.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

USC is the home of the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) and a leader over 40 years which is one of the reasons why I chose here to study. But not only that, professors are knowledgeable and helpful also in career, classmates are friendly and enthusiastic. I enjoy talking with them about academic and life.

I know MCL from Prof. Kuo who is my professor of the course Multimedia Data Compression that MCL likes a family, everyone helps each other and get progress together. I’m looking forward to making friends with all of them and doing cooperative research. It must be very pleasant.

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

Since I’m interested in compression and machine learning, Prof. Kuo’s project of joint compression and understanding catch my eyes. I treasure this opportunity very much and want to go deep into this application.

We are so happy to welcome a new Visiting Scholar, Dr. Xiaoguang Li, this Spring 2018. Let us hear what he would like to talk about his research and MCL.

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

I am Xiaoguang Li, a teacher from Beijing University of Technology. I received my Ph. D degree in circuit and system from the Beijing University of Technology in 2008. I was a Research Assistant at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2006, 2007 and 2009 and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney from Feb. to Jul. 2012. My research interests include image super resolution, face hallucination, high dynamic range image processing, and medical image analysis.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

MCL is a large group with so many students. What surprised me is that the daily affairs of the laboratory are arranged in such an orderly manner. I think it should be thanks to the culture of MCL and the good self-organization of his members. I am also deeply influenced by Professor Kuo’s passion for his research.

The campus of USC is very beautiful.

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

I cherish the time in MCL very much. During this year, I would like to try my best to broaden my horizon, to consider my academic thoughts, and to improve my ability of doing high quality research. And as well as make friends with all the members of MCL. I appreciate Prof. Kuo for providing me with such a good opportunity to visit USC and MCL.

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.