"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
-- Albert Einstein
Research Interests
It is hard to define my research interests.
During my undergraduate, my major track is in Control Theory. However, after graduation, I was crazy enough to switch field completely and go study Physics instead. It was not a completely implusive decision. I always wanted to study Physics and it had been a difficult choice for me in the first place to take Electrical Engineering as my major. After spending a few years in Physics, I decided that there were not much left to be done. (Yeah, shame on me, I didn't forsee the bloom of nanotechnology.) After coming back to EE, I first started working in the area of source coding including image and audio coding. Then, slowly and steadily I moved into other signal processing areas including enhancement, denoising and watermarking. One good thing about any problem in Engineering is that there is no absolutely perfect solution. There is a better solution, but hardly anyone can claim to have the best solution. So in a sense, there is always something one can do. But the bad thing is that every solution is a bit ad hoc in this regard. It lacks the beauty of uniqueness in real science discipline such as Math and Physics. In this respect, Information Theory is a gem in Engineering. I couldn't help and quickly fell for it. Eventually, I did a little bit work in Information Theory and a major portion of my PhD thesis is within that topic.
However, after getting my Ph.D., I was hired by a small company to conduct image processing research for medical applications. (After all, not many companies can afford to appreciate pure theory.) The work at that short period of time is very practical and is mainly involved in microscope images. However, I was also participated in a 3D face recognition project which I got very much interested in. This really ignited my interests in pattern recognition and computer vision, where in the future I would love to spend more time on.
All in all, my research interests will roughly fall into the areas of
- Information Theory (especially in the areas relating to Statistical Physics);
- Image/Signal Processing (especially in those relating to medical applications);
- Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision
Conferences
ITW 2008, ICASSP 2008, CVPR 2008, SIGGRAPH 2008, ICIP 2008, ISIT 2008, ISITA 2008