T. S. Huang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Until recently and even today most information retrieval is based on keywords. However, the increasing abundance of multimedia data esp. audio, images, and video, provides new opportunities and new challenges. Among the opportunities is the possibility of searching based on low-level audio-visual features (such as pitch, energy; color, texture, shape, layout, motion field) and mid-level features (such as prosody; trajectories) in addition to keywords. The challenges are many. Here is my top ten list.
In this talk, we shall comment briefly on these ten challenges and then discuss one of them (HCI) in some detail. In particular, a video indexing/retrieval system based on generative models will be described.
Thomas S. Huang received his B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, China; and his M.S. and Sc.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was on the Faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT from 1963 to 1973; and on the Faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering and Director of its Laboratory for Information and Signal Processing at Purdue University from 1973 to 1980. In 1980, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Head of the Image Formation and Processing Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the Institute's major research theme Human Computer Intelligent Interaction.
During his sabbatical leaves: Dr. Huang has worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and the Rheinishes Landes Museum in Bonn, West Germany, and held visiting Professor positions at the Swiss Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne, University of Hannover in West Germany, INRS-Telecommunications of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada and University of Tokyo, Japan. He has served as a consultant to numerous industrial firms and government agencies both in the U.S. and abroad.
Dr. Huang's professional interests lie in the broad area of information technology, especially the transmission and processing of multidimensional signals. He has published 21 books, and over 600 papers in Network Theory, Digital Filtering, Image Processing, and Computer Vision. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering; a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academies of Engineering and Sciences; and a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IEEE, and the Optical Society of American; and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship , an A.V. Humboldt Foundation Senior U.S. Scientist Award, and a Fellowship from the Japan Association for the Promotion of Science . He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Achievement Award in 1987, and the Society Award in 1991. He was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. Also in 2000, he received the Honda Lifetime Achievement Award for “contributions to motion analysis”. In 2001, he received the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal. In 2002, he received the King-Sun Fu Prize, International Association of Pattern Recognition; and the Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award. In 2005, he received the Okawa Prize for Information and Telecommunication Technology. In 2006, he is named "Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year" by IS&T and SPIE.
He is a Founding Editor of the International Journal Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing; and Editor of the Springer Series in Information Sciences, published by Springer Verlag.
Dr. Huang initiated the first International Picture Coding Symposium in 1969, and the first International Workshop on Very Low Bitrate Video Coding in 1993. Both meetings have become regular events (held every 12-18 months), and have contributed to the research and international standardization of image and video compression. He also (together with Peter Stucki and Sandy Pentland) initiated the International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in 1995. This Conference has also become a regular event, and provides a forum for researchers in this important and popular field.
Current Research Interests:
Multimodal (esp. audio and visual) signal processing, analysis, and visualization, esp. in the context of Human Computer Interaction.
Image and Video databases: Low-level content-based image and video retrieval; relevance feedback, GUI, data mining, event detection.