News

Zhi Tong graduated as a master student from USC in May 2013. He worked as a research assistant at MCL from May 2013 to May 2015. He decided to go back to his home country and he recently got an offer from Changjiang Securities, one of the top 10 securities companies in China. Congratulations to Zhi! We got new year greetings from Zhi to all group members. We had an interview with him.

Q: Can you briefly introduce your current work, e.g., your responsibility, position, etc.?
A: My current role is a product manager at Changjiang Securities. My responsibility is designing transactions and management systems for prime brokers (e.g. private equity and trust companies), capital management and proprietary trading.

Q: What makes you stand out among other candidates applying for the same position?
A: First, good manners. It can give interviewee a good impression. Second, out-going characteristic. It shows you can communicate with colleagues effectively and suit for teamwork. Third and most importantly, clear logic, the ability to analyze problems and define problems.

Q: How’s the learning experience in USC and MCL differentiate you from your colleagues in your company?
A: I think when we are doing research with professor Kuo, we learn how to analyze problems and define problems. Such abilities are crucial and desired no matter what field you are in or what job you have. Second, good math and knowledge of machine learning. Recently, my boss is interested in using machine learning techniques to predict certain performances of stocks. Good thing for me is that only I can do it in my team.

Q: Can you share your job hunting experience in China ? Do you have any suggestions for group members who want to [...]

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, has been traveling in Asia and attended a couple of events in the last three weeks. He visited 5 Asian cities, i.e., Singapore, Chengdu, Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong, in his trip. His activities include the delivery of three speeches: “Reflection on Image/Video Coding: Where Do We Go from Here?”, “Deep Learning: Hype or Hope?” and “Multimodal Image Retrieval in various conferences, campuses and company sites.

In particular, he attended the 10th International Conferences on Information, Communications and Signal Processing (ICICS) held in Singapore (Dec. 2-4) and the 7th Annual Conference of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) held in Hong Kong (Dec. 16-19). His speeches were very well received.

One of his most enjoyable events was the re-union with MCL alumni in Taipei on Dec. 12.

Thanksgiving luncheon has been a tradition of MCL for over twenty years and this year is no exception. This Thursday (11/25/2015), Prof. Kuo held the Thanksgiving luncheon for all MCL members at China Great Buffet in El Monte. More than twenty people including Prof Kuo’s family and other guests invited by MCL members attended this luncheon. We enjoyed the tasty food there including sushi, sashimi, seafood, Chinese food and dessert. This was also a great opportunity for MCL members to get to know each other. We chatted casually and most topics were about Thanksgiving plans.

Although we could not spend Thanksgiving with our family, we really felt quite warm when celebrating Thanksgiving together with lab fellows.

Ping Wang is a MS student majoring in Electrical Engineering (Multimedia) at USC. She is conducting directed research (DR) at MCL since the beginning of Fall 2015. We had an interview with her, talking about her research at MCL.

1. Could you please briefly introduce your research at MCL?

My research focuses on quality assessment of compressed image/video based on human’s visual perception. In this research, my group developed a Just Noticeable Difference (JND)-based image/video quality assessment metric, and conducted JND subjective test to collect data. A method to process the measured raw data is proposed afterwards, from which a human-centric quality database is constructed.

2.  Why did you choose MCL to conduct your DR?

It has to do with my major. I’m a multimedia-focusing MS student who has great passion in image/video processing and related technology. I have been taken courses in the previous three semesters yet haven’t got a taste of researching. I feel that doing a research in my cherished field is a perfect end mark for my master’s degree.

3. It’s coming to your end of DR. How would you evaluate it? Do you find it helpful for your study or future career at USC? What do you gain from this experience?

I think this short DR period at MCL is a very unforgettable experience in my whole life. Here I was provided tons of resources. It’s an amazing group where I can always find new things to learn, where each member is helpful and willing to share their experience, where everybody including Professor Kuo is working closely together and where other people’s wisdom can actually inspire me a lot. I’m pretty happy that my master’s degree is fulfilled by the valuable experience here in MCL.

Sudeng Hu, a MCL member, has passed his defense on Oct 26, 2015. Congratulations!

His dissertation title is “Techniques for Compressed visual data quality assessment and advanced video coding”. Object quality assessment for compressed images and videos is critical to various image and video compression systems that are essential in the delivery and storage. In the thesis, an image quality metric (IQM) and a video quality metric (VQM) are proposed based on perceptually weighted distortion in term of the MSE. To capture the characteristics of HVS, for images, a spatial randomness map is proposed to measure the masking effect and a preprocessing scheme is proposed to simulate the processing that occurs in the initial part of human HVS. For the VQM, the dynamic linear system is employed to model the video signal and is used to capture the temporal randomness of the videos. The performance of the proposed IQM and VQM are validated on various image and video databases with various compression distortions. The experimental results show that the proposed IQM and VQM outperforms other benchmark quality metrics.

Sudeng gave a nice talk with clarity and smooth flow. The Committee was impressed by his high quality research work and results. When talking about his success in his research work, Sudeng shared his experience with us. He believes that 4 years of PhD life gives him many good memories to have in the rest of his life. He has been enjoying working and studying with our group members since the first day he joined the MCL lab. He also enjoyed conducting research here under the guidance of Prof. Kuo. Prof. Kuo and him had an interesting research topic with great challenges. They had hard time to conquer [...]