News

The Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) is a non-profit organization with the following objectives as its mission:
1) Providing education, research and development exchange platforms for both academia and industry
2) Organizing common-interest activities for researchers and practitioners
3) Facilitating collaboration with region-specific focuses and promoting leadership for worldwide events
4) Disseminating research results and educational material via publications, presentations, and electronic media
5) Offering personal and professional career opportunities with development information and networking
The idea of APSIPA was born in Hawaii in 2007. It was formally incorporated as “Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Limited” in Hong Kong on July 23, 2009. Dr. Sadaoki Furui was elected as the first President and all other BoG members were elected at the BoG meeting held on the first day of APSIPA ASC 2009, October 4, 2009. Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo succeeded Dr. Furui to become the 2nd President of APSIPA in 2013 December.
The APSIPA Board of Governs (BoG) has set up a goal to reach 400 APSIPA Friend Labs and 5000 e-membership before the end of 2014. The membership drive consists 4 phases with 3 months per phase. By the end of Phase I (1/31/2014), APSIPA had 112 Friend Labs and 2002 e-members. The target goal (100 Friend Labs and 2000 e-members) was reached. This success was attributed to the joint and tireless of APSIPA leaders. All MCL members have worked together to promote APSIPA and recruit APSIPA new e-members.

Dr Hang Yuan successfully passed his defense on Jan 21st and becomes the 120th graduate of MCL. The title of Dr Hang’s thesis is “Modeling and Optimization of Energy-Efficient Delay-Constrained Video Sharing Servers”. The committee was pleased with Dr Hang’s strong mathematical skills in problem formulation, system modeling and analysis. Congratulations to Dr Hang’s graduation.

Professor Kuo and his research team were recently invited to visit Netflix in Los Gatos to present the latest research results in a collaboration project. Netflix is one of the most successful providers of on-demand Internet streaming media, and is currently the largest single source of Internet traffic in North America. The collaboration project aims to benefit Netflix’s video streaming technology with Professor Kuo’s expertise in video coding and video processing fields. The presentation went well and the discussions were exciting with sharing of experiences and perspectives. With the inspirations, we have confidences to keep delivering valuable results for Netflix in the on-going researches. In addition to the technical meeting, our team members also had a tour in the office, and we were all impressed by the encouraging working environment and atmosphere in Netflix.

Doctor Jing Zhang graduated from Media Communication Lab last month. Before graduation, Jing Zhang was a PhD candidate advised by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo in Electrical Engineering, and co-advised by Professor Liang Chen in Computational Biology. She worked in statistical methods in RNA-seq data analysis. Doctor Jing Zhang is now a Postdoc associate at Yale University, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. We wish her a bright academic career. You can find her publication list here and her presentation in 2012 EE Research Festival here.

The Multimedia Communication Lab actively participated in Discover USC, an open house held for prospective students on November 24th. As one of the largest programs, MCL lab tour aimed at explaining our research and achievements to prospective students who might be interested. To make the tour more fascinating and easy to understand, interesting special effects filter, face warping videos, super resolution images, as well as 3D images and video clips were demonstrated. Many parents and students showed great interests in our research topics and asked a lot of questions during the tour.