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Three MCL students presented their case studies about business startups in industry in the last lecture of the entrepreneurship course this summer.

Chien-Yi Wang presented Adobe. Adobe has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent trend towards rich Internet application software development, including digital marketing and digital media solutions. The company is famous for its development on the “Portable Document Format”, which is adopted worldwide as a common medium for electronic documents. After the hallmark technology of PDF standard, they were devoted to develop powerful software and services for people to create suitable digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time and achieve greater business success. Adobe has a unique business model which could optimize the revenue by distributing their products in several ways. The company spent lots of money on the marketing side which allowed them to stand out among their competitors. Nowadays, their products all go on the cloud for customer to subscribe and make people easier to collaborate and use via different platforms. Adobe is also leading computer vision researches which could benefit the whole digital media community.

Eddy Wu presented Fitbit Inc. Fitbit is one of the most well-known technology companies that produce activity trackers – the wireless wearable devices that measure data such as number of steps, quality of sleep, and other personal metrics. Fitbit is a fast growing company since its establishment; its revenue increased from $14.5 million in 2011 to $745 million in 2014. Fitbit went public in Jun, 2015, and the shares jumped to about $30 a piece at IPO day and valued the company over $6 billion. There are many reasons for its huge success. First of all, while its competitors put more efforts on the hardware development, [...]

In the last lecture of the entrepreneurship short course, three MCL interns presented their final projects – case studies on successful companies. Their successful and impressive presentations showcased remarkable amount of time and effort they had devoted to the projects. By finishing these projects, the interns acquired fundamental business knowledge and rich experience on technology and business innovations in the MCL.

Kevin Wang presented Zappos, a thriving online shoe and clothing store. Zappos was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and obtained their first investment funds of $500,000 from Tony Hsieh of Ventures Frog, who joined Zappos one year later, serving as the Co-CEO. According to Kevin, what distinguishes Zappos from other companies is its core value, “Deliver Happiness”. For its employees, Zappos creates a happy and family-like work environment. For its customers, Zappos wants to “wow” the customer so that he or she will come back. Knowing how to retain its customers is what keeps Zappos profitable. Each of its employees needs to go through a four-month training to improve their capability in serving customers and implementing company culture. It’s no wonder that Zappos has an estimated 75% customer retention rate.  In 2014, Zappos faced a major change in the way it was structured in 2014. It began its transition from a traditional corporate structure to a holacracy, a new type of corporate structure designed to improve communication flow.

Matthew Trans presented Riot Games, an unquestionable world top-tier game development company despite of the fact that it only has one game: League of Legends. Even though League of Legends is a free game, Riot still managed to attain revenue of $624 million last year just from microtransactions. Riot’s success roots deeply in its philosophy of creating the most-player-focused game in history. At Riot, players come first, and revenue second. Not only does Riot’s priority [...]

Joe Yuchieh Lin, a member of MCL, attended ICME 2015 hosted in Turin, Italy from June 29th to July 3rd to present his work in the Cloud based Media (CbM) Workshop. ICME has been the flagship multimedia conference since 2000. It serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems, and applications. The CbM workshop is added this year since Cloud Computing arises as a promising solution to reserve assets on demand and guarantee their provision over time. The solution lies in the design and development of an abstraction entity that is responsible to manage the media resources and the network capabilities, acting as a mediator between the client application and the media-aware cloud.

The conference, according to Joe, covers a wide range of topics in multimedia processing, all of which may lead to the most excellent research ideas. The sessions are relatively smaller but the discussions are more active. Besides, Turin is a beautiful city with history in cinema industry and presents transition from past to modern technologies in multimedia. The trip is not only full of multimedia technologies but also the artistic atmosphere in the city.

Joe presented his work in the CbM workshop. His paper is titled “EVQA: AN ENSEMBLE-LEARNING-BASED VIDEO QUALITY ASSESSMENT INDEX”. This paper proposes a scalable solution of video quality assessment method. EVQA adopts a frame-based learning mechanism to address the limited training data problem and fuses multiple image quality assessment indices to generate the final video quality score. The superior performance of the proposed EVQA index is demonstrated by experimental results conducted on both LIVE and MCL-V video databases.

We are so happy to welcome a new undergraduate student – Samuel Cheng to our lab in summer. Let us hear what he said about the intern in our group.

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

My name is Samuel Cheng and I am entering my second year as an EE major with a concentration in electronics and optics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of now, I don’t have much experience in the EE field and I am hoping that by taking these courses in the Media Communication Lab I will gain more knowledge on what I wish to do with EE. I am also interested in the field of computer vision and communication. I believe that this lab will give me a thorough introduction into this subject. Outside of school my passion is the outdoors, especially hiking, camping, and cycling.

2.What was your first impression of USC and MCL?

My first impression of USC includes not only the beautiful architecture of this school but also the advanced facilities. At MCL the students there excel in their research. Jian Li was very hospitable and he showed me around the campus and inside EEB. The students in MCL are very friendly, approachable and diligent. I’m glad that I got the chance to work with them, thanks to Professor Kuo who gave me the opportunity to come to this school over the summer.

3.What is your further expectation of being an MCL member?

I hope that I will be able to contribute my own effort to MCL and also, by helping the PHD students with their research, I can move forward on my academic endeavor.

In Summer 2014, USC MCL and Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering (PWICE) started a joint research project to build a remote collaboration system based on smart glasses. Mobile wearable devices have become popular nowadays. Smart glasses, among one of them, play an essential role in information capturing and visual enhancement. Particularly, in the sophisticated working environment for aircraft maintenance, workers have to retrieve and share information in real time with visual aids but may not have an easy access to a laptop or a tablet. In this project, we aim to develop a remote collaboration system based on smart glasses. With this remote collaboration system, each technician can use his/her smart glasses to communicate with experts/colleagues at a remote distance without interrupting the ongoing work.

In 2014, USC MCL has developed a prototype of remote collaboration system, live streaming app based on Google Glass. Video streaming system on wearable devices has demonstrated the potential influence when smart glasses were used in the plant. In 2015 and 2016, USC MCL and PWICE will continue to build the remote collaboration system, focusing on developing the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) optimization for aircraft maintenance.