After a highly competitive interview process, Ms. Zhenxia Zhou will be one of two MS students to join MCL in 2015 summer as interns. We conducted an interview with her about her previous experiences and future expectations.

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

My name is Zhenxia Zhou, an EE Master student at USC. I earned the Bachelor Degree of Engineering and Management from Nantong University in China in 2014.

Speaking of image processing, it was the undergraduate project “Color Medical Imaging Registration” that introduced me into this area, and fascinated me a lot. Before that, I had taken charge of two projects: “Wireless smart control system of Greenhouse” and “De-nosing of switch reluctance Machine”.

Other than course work, I was active in extracurricular professional activities, such as leading a team to win the second prize in the Mathematical and Computational Competition, and working as an Electrical Engineer intern for the Institute of Microelectronics of China Academy of Science (IMECAS) for two months.

Currently, I am working on a course project, to implement a “Baby face generator” on the DSP board under the guidance of Pro. Georgiou. I am getting more and more fascinated in image processing and computer vision and willing to learn more about them.

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

The excellent ranking of the USC Viterbi Engineering School first attracted me. Later, I heard the history of signal and image processing research at USC; e.g., the well-known digital image “Lena” was first scanned here. It is truly exciting for young students working in this field to be a member of the Trojan family.

The first time I browsed MCL website, I was impressed by its large size and diversified research activities such as computer vision, 3D rendering, video compression and communications etc. It is apparent that MCL is an active lab full of talented researchers and novel ideas.

3. What drove you to join MCL?

I took EE569 with Prof. Kuo in last fall semester. There was a guest lecture on image segmentation given by an MCL PhD student, Mr. Xiang Fu. I was impressed by his lecture and started to pay attention to the research activities of MCL. Later, I volunteered to attend the subjective test conducted by MCL. The test was interesting and the team was so organized. All team members were all talented and warm-hearted, which made me start to think of becoming an MCL member one day.

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

I wish that I could have more comprehensive understanding of algorithms and gain more hands-on experience, especially in the computer vision area. I thirst to learn new things such as machine learning and pattern recognition. With the guidance of Prof. Kuo, I am confident that it will be a wonderful and valuable experience for me and will help me grow a lot.