Research is my profession, and everlasting passion. I work on Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Optimization, as well as their interdisciplinary applications.
I have had the unbelievable fortune to work with a group of ROCKSTAR students, who are much better than myself! My group, Visual Informatics@Texas, Austin (VITA), regularly publishes in CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, etc.
As of 08/2020, my top-5 favorite papers are (with my admittedly very biased and time-varying taste; and they're embarrassingly on five different topics):
- T. Chen, S. Liu, S. Chang, Y. Cheng, L. Amini, and Z. Wang, “Adversarial Robustness: From Self-Supervised Pretraining to Fine-Tuning”, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020.
- H. Wang, T. Chen, Z. Wang, and K. Ma, "I am Going MAD: Maximum Discrepancy Competition for Comparing Classifiers Adaptively", International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020.
- X. Gong, S. Chang, Y. Jiang, and Z. Wang, “AutoGAN: Neural Architecture Search for Generative Adversarial Networks”, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
- J. Liu, X. Chen, Z. Wang, and W. Yin, “ALISTA: Analytic Weights Are As Good As Learned Weights in LISTA”, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2019.
- B. Li, W. Ren, D. Fu, D. Tao, D. Feng, W. Zeng, and Z. Wang, “Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond”, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2019.
My research has been recognized by:
- Two federal faculty awards: ARO Young Investigator Award (YIP), NSF CRII Award
- Three industry faculty awards: IBM Faculty Research Award, Amazon Research Award (AWS AI), Adobe Data Science Research Award
- Four challenge prizes: CVPR'20 LPCV, ICCV'19 WIDER, ECCV'18 ChaLearn, and CVPR'18 UG2
- A few more university-level awards: TEES Young Faculty Fellow, TAMU Engineering Genesis Award, UIUC Huang Research Award, UIUC CS/AI Research Award...
My favorite hobby is traveling. I have visited 43 out of 50 states in the US (to most of them I drove my own car as a backpacker!), and 5 out of 7 continents on the globe (Antarctica and Africa - just hold on a moment).
These experiences have instilled me with an open mind on human behavior, and a respect for those things that make us different and similar to one another.
When I am not preparing for class, buried in research projects, or traveling the globe, you’re likely to find me:
- Reciting and writing poems
- Enjoying wines/sakes/craft beers/whiskies
- Watching movies (I'm addicted to Woody Allen)
- Cooking Chinese and Japanese cuisines (this is perhaps my real gift)
- Doing early morning workouts in the gym; or hiking during the weekends
One Last "Fun fact": my first name accidentally pronounces like "not humble" in Chinese. That unfortunate coincidence has caused an annoying stereotype on my life. But it's such a hassle to change the legal name, so I'll live with it for the rest of my life.
Credits:
Personal webpage. Meant to be unofficial. Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or group.