MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, gave a keynote speech at the LEAP 3.0 annual conference at the USC Davidson Conference Center at 1:50-2:50pm, October 25 (Saturday), 2014. LEAP is the acronym of “Leadership, Excellence, Aspiration and Platform”, which is a career development forum series launched in 2013. It is co-founded by the Chinese-American Engineers and Scientists Association of Southern California (CESASC) and Southwestern Chinese Students and Scholars Association (SWCSSA). The purpose of the LEAP conferences is to provide a professional networking platform for Chinese students and Chinese American professionals throughout their overseas studies and professional careers.

In his speech, Professor Kuo first gave an overview on big data science and engineering. He pointed out two big data industrial sectors: 1) big data infrastructure providers and 2) big data service providers. Although there will be a steady growth in the sector of big data infrastructure providers, he emphasized the value and opportunities in the sector of big data service providers. Furthermore, he elaborated on several key technologies in big data analytics, including machine learning, data mining, speech understanding and computer vision. At the end of his talk, Professor Kuo made a prediction by saying that “the coming decade (2015-2025) would be the golden decade for the computer vision researchers since quite a few major breakthroughs would come out and lay the foundation of modern computer vision.” Professor Kuo also answered several questions from the floor. The keynote was well received.