Abstract:

With the rapid advances in sensing, computing and networking technologies, we, including scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors, are all excited about realizing a dream: making intelligent seeing machines that are able to automatically analyze, interpret, understand, and learn from images and video. It has become one of the major driving forces for the next generation of computing. Such intelligent seeing machines may be widely applicable to save our humans from tediousness, to extend our human sensing capacities, and to reduce the errors that our human may make, in many emerging applications, including intelligent video analytics and surveillance, autonomous robots, autonomous/assisted driving, medical image analysis and assisted diagnosis, intelligent and multi-modal human-computer interactions, etc.

This research of intelligent seeing machine to understand the scene and the human is the ultimate goal of computer vision. As it covers very broad topics, from low-level image processing to high-level visual

semantics, it is closely related to signal processing, graphics, machine learning, natural language, robotics, etc. It has been an important part of both ECE and CS, and is a strong tie of ECE and CS, especially in the era of AI.

In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the research in my lab. It mainly includes five topics: (1) vision-based perception and understanding of the human and the scene, (2) interactive and autonomous mobile robots, (3) multimedia pattern discovery and mining, (4) image recovery and visual modeling, and (5) computational vision science. I will present some on-going research activities along these research directions.

Bio:

Dr. Ying Wu is Full professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He received his B.S. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1994, the M.S. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1997, and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, Illinois, in 2001. In 2001, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2007 and full professor in 2012. His current research interests include computer vision, autonomous robots, pattern recognition, machine learning, multimedia data mining, and human-computer interaction. He serves as associate editors for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE T-PAMI), IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE T-IP), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (IEEE-TCSVT), SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI), and IAPR Journal of Machine Vision and Applications (MVA). He serves as Program Chair and Area Chairs for top conferences including CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV. He received the Robert T. Chien Award at UIUC in 2001, and the NSF CAREER award in 2003. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.