Keynote Speakers

Tuesday, December 8, 09:00-10:00  

Abstracts: Over the last 30 years, imaging technologies have truly revolutionized many important aspects of our lives. Television and the web have made images pervasive, but in addition the innovations of medical imaging have changed the face of healthcare. In fact, in a recent study of the National Academy of Engineering, “Imaging” was named as one of the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. With all this success, it is tempting to think that we are finished, but this talk makes the point that there is still a long way to go by posing a set of 6 fundamentally unsolved Grand Challenge problems in the field of imaging. Each problem is presented along with research examples from a variety of researchers that illustrate the importance of the problems, the possible strategies for success, and the potential benefits to society.

Biography: Charles A. Bouman received a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and a MS degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982. From 1982 to 1985, he was a full staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and in 1989 he received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University. In 1989, he joined the faculty of Purdue University where he is the Michael J. and Katherine R. Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Biomedical Engineering and is co-director of Purdue’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility located in Purdue’s Research Park.

Professor Bouman's research focuses on the use of statistical image models, multiscale techniques, and fast algorithms in applications including tomographic reconstruction, medical imaging, and document rendering and acquisition. Professor Bouman is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), a Fellow of the SPIE professional society. He is also a recipient of IS&T’s Raymond C. Bowman Award for outstanding contributions to digital imaging education and research, has been a Purdue University Faculty Scholar, and received the College of Engineering Engagement/Service Award, and Team Award.  He is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, a member of the Board of Governors and a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has also been Co-Chair of the 2006 SPIE/IS&T Symposium on Electronic Imaging, Co-Chair of the SPIE/IS&T conferences on Visual Communications and Image Processing 2000 (VCIP), a Vice President of Publications and a member of the Board of Directors for the IS&T Society, and he is the founder and Co-Chair of the SPIE/IS&T conference on Computational Imaging.

Abstracts: Over the last two decades, wireless communications has witnessed an explosive growth and without any doubt has revolutionized many aspects of our daily lives. In this short time period, wireless networks have advanced through three generations (1G, 2G, and 3G), and many licensed or license-free wireless technologies such as WiMAX and WiFi have also emerged to complement the capabilities of cellular networks. To support new applications and advanced services under limited radio resources and harsh wireless channel conditions, dynamic resource allocation, which achieves both higher system spectral efficiency and better Quality of Service (QoS), has been identified as one of the key and promising techniques. In particular, jointly optimizing resource allocation across adjacent and even non-adjacent layers of the protocol stack leads to a dramatic improvement in the overall system performance. In this talk, we will discuss the challenges facing the XG ubiquitous broadband systems and then describe some of the leading enabling technologies for increasing system capacity and spectral efficiency while meeting the stringent requirements of future networks. We shall provide an overview of the latest research on dynamic resource allocation, especially for broadband MIMO and OFDM systems. Recent work and open issues in next-generation wireless networks as well as the future directions of wireless communications will also be discussed.

Biography: Professor Letaief received the Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, USA in 1990.  From 1990 to 1993, he was a faculty member at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Since 1993, he has been with HKUST where he is currently the Dean of Engineering.  He is Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering as well as the Director of the Hong Kong Telecom Institute of Information Technology.

Dr. Letaief is an acknowledged authority in the area of wireless and mobile communications.  He served as consultants for different organizations and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has served on the editorial board of other prestigious journals including the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Wireless Series (as Editor-in-Chief). He has been involved in organizing a number of major international conferences and events. These include serving as the General Co-Chair of the 2007 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC07, in Hong Kong; Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Communication, ICC08 in Beijing; and Vice General Chair of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communication, ICC’10, in Cape Town.

Dr. Letaief is a Fellow of IEEE. He served as an elected member of the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors, and IEEE Distinguished lecturer. He also served as the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Wireless Communications, Chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and Chair of the 2008 IEEE Technical Activities/Member and Geographic Activities Visits Program. He is currently serving as member of both the IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Fellow Evaluation Committees, member of the IEEE Technical Activities Board/PSPB Products & Services Committee as well as Vice-President Elect for Conferences of the IEEE Communications Society.

He is the recipient of many distinguished awards including the 2007 IEEE Communications Society Publications Exemplary Award, 8 Best Paper Awards with the latest being the prestigious 2009 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, as well as, the Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching (Highest university-wide teaching award at HKUST).

Thursday, December 10, 09:00-10:00  

Abstracts: The rapid development of Web provides a new paradigm that calls for a rethinking of the traditional approaches for multimedia content analysis and research.   In this talk, we will first review some traditional approaches in content-based multimedia retrieval.  This will be followed by an overview of new computing trends  in view of the paradigm shift and the new challenges and opportunities those trends bring. Then, we will present a set of efforts in web multimedia search to illustrate interesting new thoughts that potentially will lead to new breakthroughs in multimedia search and key applications.

Biography: Dr. Hong-Jiang Zhang is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Microsoft China Research and Development Group (CRD) and Managing Director of the Microsoft Advanced Technology Center (ATC). Before starting ATC, Dr. Zhang was the Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research (MSR) Asia. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Zhang was with Hewlett-Packard Labs at Palo Alto, CA, where he was a research manager. He also worked at the Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore. Dr. Zhang's work has had a significant impact on the development of Microsoft's research and development capabilities, Microsoft products, the IT industry and the academic community.  He has authored four books, over 350 scientific papers, and holds over 60 US patents.  As an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, Dr. Zhang is well recognized for his leadership in media computing and his pioneering work in video and image content analysis, search and browsing.  He is also the winner of 2008 Asian American Engineers of the Year.