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I was born in Hong Kong, a beautiful city in southern part of China. I received a wonderful primary and secondary education from the LaSalle College in Kowloon, Hong Kong. I came to the U.S. when I was 18 years old, and attended the University of Washington in Seattle. I was first exposed to many ideas in signal processing after working with Professor Les Atlas in the EE department. After completing my B.S. degree in Computer Engineering at UW, I went to University of California, Berkeley to continue my studies. Professor Avideh Zakhor from the EECS department introduced me to the wonderful world of video compression and I began to investigate various ideas in scalable video compression using wavelet. Lured by the "big bucks" from Silicon Valley, I quit grad school and joined the Compression Lab Inc. (CLI, later acquired by VTEL), a video-conferencing company, as a research engineer. CLI gave me an excellent opportunity to learn about different types of industrial multimedia applications. I also managed to keep up with the latest research by attending conferences and international standard meetings like ITU-T and MPEG. At the same time, I realized that I needed a more advanced degree in order to pursue further research. In 1998, I went back to Berkeley and continued my studies with Professor Zakhor. At the same time, my interests shifted from pure video compression to the broader topic of multimedia data analysis. My Ph.D. dissertation was on building fast techniques to summarize, store, and search similar video sequences in large databases. After graduation, I landed a post-doctoral position in the Sapphire group, at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). My post-doc adviser was Dr. Chandrika Kamath, who showed me that many of the ideas from multimedia can also be applied to scientific data mining. Even though LLNL is a fun place to work, I miss the teaching and the academic freedom offered by an university. In 2004, I joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky as an assistant professor. I also hold a joint appointment at the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environment. I was promoted to the Associate Professor Rank in the summer of 2010. My primary area of research is in multimedia signal processing – to develop efficient, robust, and secure systems to analyze, process, and communicate multimedia information including audio, visual, and other perceptual data. It is a challenging area of research as most multimedia applications require handling of data at a very high rate, and demand a truly realistic user experience. From privacy-enhanced signal processing to developing multimedia assistive technologies for autism, all my research projects are driven by applications. In particular, I like to focus on those applications that are of high impact but have not yet been addressed by the current technologies. Working with collaborators and students, my objective is to develop a research program that can balance two goals: (1) to develop prototype systems for the end users with properly-defined measures of success, and (2) to investigate the scientific problems behind by proposing new theories to enhance our fundamental understanding of these problems. |
