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We are so happy to welcome a new Ph.D. student, Yeji Shen, in fall 2016. Here is an interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself?  (Previous research/project experience, research interest and expertise)

Before becoming a Ph.D. student in USC, I got my bachelor degree in Computer Science from Peking University. My past research experience includes Image Quality Assessment (IQA), a little bit on Computational Neuroscience and a few on Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning. I have published one paper on IQA under the supervision of Prof. Tingting Jiang. She is also the advisor of my bachelor thesis. I was having a wonderful experience last summer in Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. Tai Sing Lee on an EEG based project. My research interest is mainly about exploring the essentials of Machine Learning (ML) theory and applying ML techniques to multiple areas like CV, or ultimately speaking, the Artificial Intelligence. I was having strong programming skills 🙂 but relatively thin knowledge in mathematics and statistics where I am trying to improve through the training of Ph.D. program. Personally, I play baseball / softball and possess some skills in Slow Pitch. I like games and animations.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

USC has a beautiful campus which stands head and shoulders above the environment nearby. Convenient facilities, gyms and fountains are everywhere. She is a university with history and culture. I am looking forward to becoming a proud Trojan nourished by USC.

MCL is an awesome and prospering research group having more than 20 friendly and hardworking members. Everything goes well under the supervision of Prof. Kuo. Prof. Kuo is profound in knowledge and research. He is a very nice advisor and also a senior worthy [...]

In summer 2016, four MCL members—Siyang Li, Chen Chen, Shangwen Li, and Jian Li—worked for Google, Facebook (Chen and Shangwen), and Apple respectively as summer interns. We are so glad to have them share their internship experience.

1. How was working in Apple/Facebook/Google?

Jian: The working environment and atmosphere in Apple are amazing but very unique when having Internship at Apple. You can work with smart people all around the world, who are friendly and helpful. Mentors and managers work closely with interns so that we can make contributions. I was working as a R&D role, which I enjoyed a lot. Moreover, you can also find good work and life balance here since there were several special events only for Apple summer interns.
Siyang Li: This was my second intern at Google, so everything went quite smoothly. My colleagues were friendly and helpful. Whenever I got stuck, my host answered my question quickly and pointed to helpful resources. Life there was easy, as almost everything (food, gym, laundry) was free. I guess this is Google’s trick to make you more concentrated on work.
Chen and Shangwen: It is firstly excited to get into Facebook—one of the top IT company in the work. On the first day of our training session, we met a lot of young genius from top Universities. We started to feel pressure from then. In the company, everyone is smart and diligent. That makes the moving pace extremely fast for the whole team. It is good to visualize, experience and push the high speed and learn from the genius around us. On the other side, there is still a lot of fun during the time we are in Facebook. There are many interesting [...]

Four MCL students presented their case studies case studies on successful companies. Their impressive presentations shared fundamental business knowledge and rich experience on technology and business innovations.

De Lan presented HTC Corporation. HTC is a consumer electronics company selling hardware mainly including smart-phones, tablets and VR devices. In early stage, HTC made many great breakthroughs that contribute to today’s smartphone market. In this presentation, He went through HTC’s glorious history and then focused on the comparison of HTC with other mobile phone industry giants and the reason analysis of HTC’s falling in smartphone market, which can be concluded as strong competitors, market loss and vague product positioning. And then he threw the idea that to return glory, HTC should overcome those drawbacks and adjust its marketing strategy to adapt different market environments and grasp the hope of VR business tightly.

Chuanzi He presented Pandora. Pandora, powered by Music Genome Project, is an Internet radio company which feeds you personalized good music. Music Genome Project is Pandora’s secret recipe for maintaining a large group of loyal active users. Based on an algorithm taking into account of your musical taste and more than 450 hand-crafted musicological features or genes, it always manages to make a satisfactory decision on what to play next for you. In her case study, she analyzed the “freedium” business model of Pandora, its struggles with royalties, its competitors and opportunities for Pandora to further branch out.

Eric Hsieh introduced Din Tai Fung Restaurant, which is famous for its steamed dumplings. There are always crowded at the entrance of this restaurant, why is it so attractive to everyone? He helped us to find it out!

Yueru Chen introduced Tencent which is one of the largest internet company in the [...]

In summer 2016, MCL welcomes a new intern student, De Lan. We gave him a warm welcome and had a short interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

Hi, I’m De Lan from Sichuan provence in China, now studying at Department of Electronic Engineering of BUAA (Beihang University), Beijing, China. I’ll be a senior student soon next semester. I took part in a research project in my university, focusing on human eye saliency prediction in video. I am interested in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. I find them really  intriguing and promising. And that’s why I came here this summer.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

There were some intimidating rumors about USC before I came here. However, through what I’ve experienced, I find this place really nice. A big campus with fantastic museums and exhibition hall, many large comfortable libraries and beautiful campus landscaping. And everyone here is friendly. Especially in MCL, members are always prepared to help each other, although we just met the first time for most of us.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

MCL is like a united big family guided by Prof.Kuo ,everyone is great and working hard. I hope to make more friends and learn more about computer vision here in the rest time of this summer.  And I believe MCL members are going to make good news in academic world!

In summer 2016, MCL welcomes a new intern student, Weiqi Fang. We gave him a warm welcome and had a short interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

I come from Shenzhen, China and major in Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. I am now in my Junior year, and gonna be a Senior Student next semester. I have interned in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore the last summer, doing works on speech signal analysis. My research interest is image processing, including image detection, image classification and so on. I am very interested in image detection, especially face detection.
I have a variety of hobbies, including tennis, basketball, watching movies, hobby collection and so on.
2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

I think that MCL is a very warm and positive group. Students here are all very kind and helpful. Everybody works hard. I feel honored and am very glad to be here as a part of MCL.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I wish to learn more about CNN and wish to be able to work out some project by the time I am leaving here. I am looking forward to make friends with you all and make progress in image processing field.