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Dr. Hui Yong Kim, a senior researcher of Broadcasting and Telecommunications Media Research Laboratory of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and also a former adjunct professor at University of Science and Technology (UST) in Korea, visited Media Communication Lab since September 2013. He generously spent some of his short time with us to share his research.

Could you give us a brief introduction about your research experience?

I would like to start from my PhD research experience. I worked on visual surveillance project during my PhD years, and the project required object detection and segmentation from videos. By separating background and foreground, I compressed detected objects and background differently to increase quality of objects area. After graduation, I joined a start-up company because I wanted to get a whole picture of how the real devices are developed. There, I mainly developed H.264 real-time codec software for several video communication systems, such as IP video phone and other consumer products. Because I was a manager in multimedia team, I also needed to care other issues like middle-wares, communication protocols, audio codecs, graphical user interfaces, and even mechanical designs. After few years, I decided to move to ETRI to continue my research path. In ETRI, I participated and contributed to developments of several international standards, including MPEG Multimedia Application Formats and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). During the process, I developed more than 70 patent algorithms.

Could you also talk about your research interest?

My research interests include video/image signal processing and compression for realistic video services, such as UHDTV and 3DTV. They are called as “realistic media”, which implies making things real to human. My research goal is how to maximize visual reality to the user efficiently under [...]

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.