News

In 2014 Fall semester, Chien-Yi Wang will become a new Ph.D. student in MCLab. Chien-Yi Wang received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2013. He arrived at USC a month ago, and now we have an interview with him, talking about his background and his thoughts on USC and MCLab.

What were your first impression of USC and MCLab?

I have heard of USC in its great learning environment and plenty of resources. At first sight, the buildings in USC are amazing and beautiful. There are usually many trees and animals around the campus, bringing lots of energy and spirits. I also notice that there are always some comfortable benches and tables, accompanying with fabulous fountains, for people to study and chat outside. I am so excited and cannot wait to study in this wonderful campus.
As for MCLab, I think people here are really nice and friendly. Some senior students in the lab introduce many places in the campus for me, and try to help me to get used to the life in Los Angeles. I also got many assistances and advices from them in academy and living before I entered the school. It’s really great to become one of this big warm family.

Could you briefly describe your previous research experience?

In the last two years of my B.S. program, I joined the Wireless Communication Lab and initiated a research project on multimedia communication subject. I have studied the protocols of different wireless systems and learned how to use complex encoding technologies such as H.264 on video sources. I found it interesting to design some algorithms and implement them on the wireless driver. I finally proposed a scheme to improve the [...]

On Thursday (08/14)evening, 17 USC MCL alumni in Taiwan had a re-union party with Prof. Kuo. The party was held in Gabriel Lin’s new house in Hsinchu. The attendees graduated from 1994 to 2011 including: Kwo-Jyr Wong (1994), Chun-Hsiung (Gene) Chuang (1994), Li-Chien Lin (1994), Yu-Chuan (Gabriel) Lin (1995), Houngjyh (Mike) Wang (1998), Huan Chen (2002), Chien-Hwa Hwang (2003), Po-Chyi Su (2003), Sau-Hsuan Wu (2003), Feng-Tsun Chien (2004), Shang-Ho (Lawrence) Tsai (2005), Pei-Kai Liao (2007), Chia-Chin (Kelvin) Chou (2007), Yu-Hao (Roger) Chang (2007), Chia-Chun (Alex) Hsu (2007), Yu-Jung (Ronald) Chang (2008), Peiying (Naco) Chiang (2011), Chung-Cheng (Roy) Lou (2011).

In this party, Prof. Kuo shared the recent situation about USC and MCL Lab. In addition, each member shared his/her working experience in recent years, and some funny and interesting things in the USC. Everyone had a good time and enjoyed the happy atmosphere. This party ended late at 11:30pm.

Via the re-unions, the MCL alumni in Taiwan have built strong connections both in the industry and academia. To date, there are around 35 MCL alumni in Taiwan, working in diverse areas. Most of them are faculty members in prestige schools, some are senior engineers or high level managers in leading companies, and some are the founders of new companies. The MCL alumni keep making contributions to develop new technologies for Taiwan, and the world.

News written by Shang-Ho (Lawrence) Tsai

In Friday morning, three high school internship students gave their final presentations about Kinect project and the website they built during the web design mini course. Through the successful and impressive presentation, it also showed the fact that these students surely put a lot of efforts into their works.

One of their mentor, Weihao Gan said, “It was a great pleasure to work with Kaiwen and Harry on the Kinect project which was developed on C/C++ platform. Actually, besides the technique part, the more important thing they need to learn is how to generate an engineering product. During this process, they firstly thought about the idea and wrote the proposal, then followed the schedule to finish the work. They were all very hard-working and creative. We talked and discussed every week about the project, and I also learned a lot from this supervision experience. Again, I want to thank Kaiwen and Harry for working together and sharing an amazing summer time.”

In addition, after the presentation, their parents also brought homemade Chinese food and joined the group seminar to show their support. Group members all appreciated them very much. During the seminar, the summer interns also expressed their thanks to the whole team including Weihao Gan and Xin Zhang, who supervised them on the project; Brian Lan and Becky Qiu, who taught them in the web design mini course. They also appreciated Prof. Kuo for giving them this precious chance to come here and teaching them in Entrepreneurship mini course.

Congratulations on their achievement and well-done work!

Lina Jin, a researcher of Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, have been visiting Media Communication Lab since October 2013. She kindly took some time to share her research experience with us.

Could you talk about your research interest?

My research interests mainly focus on image and video quality metrics, human vision modeling, stereoscopic video quality metrics, perceptual image coding, image enhancement and super resolution.  Modern image and video system typically consist of several processing stages, such as acquisition, compression, storage, transmission, enhancement, and reproduction. In ach stage, noised might be introduced, resulting in a degradation of visual quality. Therefore, quality assessment plays an important role in the design or optimization for an image processing system. The objective quality assessment aims at automatically estimating input image or video quality and highly correlating to subjective judgment .To design an effective and efficient quality assessment algorithm, we need deeply understand how human visual system (HVS) perceives image quality and how these properties could be simulated. The research I am currently working on in MCL is related to quality assessment based image enhancement and super resolution for UHDTV.

Please share your thoughts about our lab.

It’s a great honor for me towork at MCL group with Prof. Kuo and group members. MCL is one of world famous labs in the field of multimedia.  Now, MCL group is conducting academic research on cutting-age topics, such as computer vision, machine learning, and image processing.

Every Friday, MCL group holds an academic seminar. During the seminar, Prof. Kuo shares his research experiences to thegroup members, and one of his studentsgives an one-hour high-quality presentation to share and discuss his or her recent research work with others. I am very enjoyed the seminar [...]

MCLab provides summer intern position to three 11th grade high school students, Allison, Harry, and Kaiwen. During this summer, they are taking two courses and working on one project, which are listed as following:
Web Analysis and Design (taught by Brian Lan and Becky Qiu) – Hosts on  Tuesday between 2 and 4 pm and Friday from 10 am to 12 pm
Entrepreneurship (taught by Prof Kuo) – Hosts on Thursday from 2 to 4 pm
Project (supervised by Xin Zhang and Weihao Gan) – Get acquainted with Microsoft Kinect system and learn to develop applications based on it

We also have the chance to interview with those three students about their backgrounds and interests.

Allison: I am an incoming senior at Arcadia High School. I am part of my school’s varsity percussion team. It’s really awesome. If you’re interested, I’d be excited to share some videos and tell you what it is we do. I am also currently working as a waitress at Stonefire Grill. I have two cats. My two cats, best friends, and family are the people I hold closest in my heart(: As for academic interests, I’m dabbling in different things in hopes of discovering something I am passionate about.

Harry: I am currently a rising senior at the Harker School in San Jose. I like to study Mathematics and Sciences in the classroom and enjoy swimming and playing water polo in my free time. As an avid student, I plan on continuing to study Computer Science or engineering in college. Outside of school, I also enjoy surfing the web and watching tv shows.

Kaiwen: I’m an incoming senior at Arcadia High School. I’m part of my school’s Math Team and Physics Team  and am president of a club [...]