Zhangyang (Atlas) Wang

Disclaimer: I am now gaining more weights than in the above photo (taken in my senior year) :)

[Publicity & Service] 10/2017, I will co-organize the workshop: "Real-World Face and Object Recognition from Low-Quality Images (FOR-LQ)", in conjunction with IEEE FG 2018, jointly with Prof. Dong Liu, Prof. Weisheng Dong, and Ding Liu.
[Honor & Support] 10/2017, I'm grateful to be selected as a winner of the Lenovo AI Innovation Challenge, and will give an invited talk at the Supercomputing (SC) 2017 conference, Denver, CO.
[Travel & Talk] 09/2017, I'm grateful to be selected as an invited presenter at the CCC Symposium: "Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs 2017", Washington, DC.
[Travel & Talk] 09/2017, I gave several talks on campus: ECE CESG Seminar (sparsity in deep network algrithms and hardware); CSCE Graduate Seminar and ECE Bio-Seminar (robust computer vision in the wild).
[Publicity & Service] 09/2017, I will serve on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of PAKDD'18.
[Honor & Support] 08/2017, I'm grateful to receive the generous funding support from Adobe Research, as the sole PI, to support our research on deep learning for video recognition,
[Honor & Support] 08/2017, I was selected to receive the ICCV 2017 Young Researcher Travel Award.
[Publicity & Service] 08/2017, I will serve on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of MIPR'18.
[Mentoring & Teaching] Fall 2017, I will teach CSCE 689: Machine Learning Methods for Computer Vision. Aggies who are interested in my research: please consider taking this course.
[Travel & Talk] 07/2017, I attended CVPR'17, in Honolulu, HI, and gave the tutorial, "Dealing with Reality: Low-Quality Visual Data Processing and Analytics", jointly with Dr. Haichao Zhang and Prof. Jiebo Luo. [Slides uploaded to the Tutorial page] [Video record available on YouTube] [Photo]
[Publication] 07/2017, One paper submitted to IEEE TIP [Draft available on arXiv: single image dehazing + object detection as a joint pipeline].
[Publication] 07/2017, Two papers accepted to ICCV'17:
- The paper "Robust Video Super-Resolution with Learned Temporal Dynamics" proposed a temporal adaptive neural network for video super-resolution that adaptively modulates temporal dependency, and reduced the complexity of motion between neighboring frames using a spatial alignment network.
- The paper “AOD -Net: All-in-One Dehazing Network” proposed the first-of-its-kind deep end-to-end model (defined as a fully learnable deep regression from hazy images to clean images) for single-image haze removal, and discussed its inspiring impacts on Faster-RCNN object detection [Check Boyi's awesome project website!]. Congratulations to my mentee Boyi on publishing her first paper!
[Publication] 07/2017, One paper accepted to ACII'17 [Codes Available]. This is a cute paper (although quite preliminary) that I particularly like: discussing how deep learning could help video coding and transmission in an end-to-end and task-driven manner. Congratulations to my mentee Bowen on publishing his first paper!
[Travel & Talk] 07/2017, I gave an invited talk, at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Phoenix, AZ.
[Publication] 06/2017, One paper accepted to BMVC'17 [Codes Available]. Two highlights:
- We relaxed the classical "spread property" of ℓ∞-minimization [Studer et. al. 2014] for hashing, avoiding the full-spark dictionary assumption and making anti-sparse solutions attainable under milder conditions.
- The model learned a (dimension-reduction) transform, a dictionary and the representation simultaneously.
[Publicity & Service] 06/2017, I will serve on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of AAAI'18.
[Publication] 05/2017, One paper accepted to ICIP'17.
[Publication] 05/2017, One paper accepted to IEEE TIP. We proposed a greedy batch-based minimum-cost flow approach for tracking multiple objects. [Codes Available].
[Publication] 05/2017, One paper accepted to CVPR'17 NITRE workshop. The UIUC team participated in the NITRE Image Super-Resolution Challenge, and ranked Top-5 in accuracy and Top-2 in speed, among a total of 19 teams. [Codes Available] [Read Our Co-Authored Challenge Report]
[Publicity & Service] 04/2017, I will co-chair the VCIP'17 special session: "Regularization Techniques for High-Dimensional Visual Data Processing and Analysis", jointly with Dr. Xi Peng and Dr. Sheng Li.
[Publication] 04/2017, One paper accepted to IJCAI'17.
[Publicity & Service] 03/2017, I will serve as the Program Committee Co-Chair of the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG), in conjunction with ICCV 2017. Please consider submitting to this highly reputed serial workshop.
[Mentoring & Teaching] 03/2017, I am truly delighted to welcome 4 Ph.D. students to join my research group in CSE@TAMU, at Fall 2017 -- HOWDY TEAM!
[Publicity & Service] 03/2017, I served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of ACM MM'17.
[Publicity & Service] 02/2017, I was appointed as an Area Chair for ICIP'17.
[Honor & Support] 02/2017, I was honored and humbled to be nominated as a Finalist of the UW Amazon Catalyst Innovation Award (jointly with Prof. Shuai Huang), for our proposed smart healthcare research.
[Publication] 02/2017, One paper accepted to IJCNN'17.
[Announcement] 01/2017 - 07/2017, I am visiting the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, as a Research Scientist. My research focus over this period will be to develop tailored computer vision and machine learning techniques for medical and healthcare data analytics.
[Publicity & Service] 01/2017, I was appointed as an Associate Editor for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Neural Networks and Its Applications.
[Publicity & Service] 01/2017, I serve as a Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), Special Issue on "Discriminative Learning for Model Optimization and Statistical Inference". High-quality submissions are solicited until the deadline 07/15/2017. [Call For Papers]
[Publicity & Service] 01/2017, I will serve on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of VCIP'17.
[Publicity & Service] 12/2016, I will co-organize the 2nd International Workshop on Biomedical infOrmatics with Optimization and Machine learning (BOOM), co-located with International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’17), Melbourne, in August 2017. [Call For Papers].
[Publicity & Service] 12/2016, I served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of IJCAI'17.
[Publication]12/2016, My first US patent was granted! "Font recognition and font similarity learning using a deep neural network", US patent no. 9501724.
[Publication]12/2016, My second book will be published by Elsevier: "Deep Learning through Sparse and Low-Rank Modeling" (jointly with Prof. Yun Raymond Fu and Prof. Thomas Huang).
[Publicity & Service] 11/2016, I served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of CVPR'17.
[Announcement] 10/2016, I passed my final defense and received my Ph.D. degree from ECE@UIUC. My thesis title is: "Task-Specific and Interpretable Feature Learning".
[Announcement] Happy 80-th Birthday, Tom! 10/2016, We held a successful symposium to honor the unparallel career of my Ph.D. advisor, Prof. Thomas S. Huang.
[Mentoring & Teaching] 09/2016, My mentee Bowen Cheng (senior at ECE@UIUC) received the prestigious Emma L. Marshall Scholarship from the ECE department. Congratulations, Bowen!
[Publicity & Service] 08/2016, I served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of IJCNN'17.
[Publicity & Service] 08/2016, I served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of PAKDD'17.
[Publicity & Service] 08/2016, our regular tutorial, "Deep Learning Meets Model Optimization and Statistical Inference", was accepted by ECCV 2016, October 8th, 2016, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
[Travel & Talk] 07/2016, I was a short-term visiting researcher, at Dept. Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.
[Publicity & Service] 07/2016, my research was featured by UIUC ECE Headline again.
[Travel & Talk] 07/2016, I attended IJCAI'16, in New York, NY, and presented one paper. I also co-chaired the IJCAI'16 BOOM workshop.
[Travel & Talk] 06/2016, I attended CVPR'16, in Las Vegas, NV, and presented two papers (1, 2). I was also selected into the CVPR 2016 Doctoral Consortium (mentor: Prof. Rene Vidal).
[Publication] 06/2016, One paper accepted to ACM MM'16.
[Publicity & Service] 06/2016, DeepFont was covered by BBS News and International Business Times.
[Travel & Talk] 06/2016, I was an invited speaker at the PKU Workshop on Data Science and Applications, held by Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research (BICMR), PKU, Beijing, China.
[Travel & Talk] 06/2016, I was an invited speaker at the 2016 Workshop on Sparsity Revisited (SPARE), USTC, Hefei, China.
[Travel & Talk] 05/2016, I gave an invited talk, in Chinese R Conference 2016 (Machine Learning Session), organized by Capital of Statistics (COS), Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
[Honor & Support] 05/2016, I felt honored to accept the Dissertation Completion Fellowship, as the only recipient from the ECE department. This year, 29 Ph.D. students from 27 departments were selected for the prestigious fellowship, by UIUC graduate college.
[Travel & Talk] 05/2016, I attended SDM'16, in Miami, FL, and presented one paper. I also helped organize the SDM'16 MLRec workshop.
[Travel & Talk] 05/2016, I visited Dept. EECS, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, and gave a seminar, hosted by Prof. Ying Wu.
[Announcement] 04/2016, I accepted the offer to join the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department, at the Texas A&M University (TAMU), as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor.
[Travel & Talk] 04/2016, I visited Dept. Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, and gave a seminar, hosted by Prof. Shuai Huang.
[Honor & Support] 04/2016, I was honored and humbled to accept the 2016 Thomas and Margaret Huang Award for Graduate Research from UIUC, for my research record.
[Publication] 04/2016, One paper accepted to IJCAI'16.
[Publicity & Service] 04/2016, DeepFont was covered by Fortune, Adobe Corporate Communications, and UIUC Resonance Magazine (Spring 2016).
[Publicity & Service] 04/2016, I served on Technical Program Committee (TPC) of ACM MM'16.
[Publication] 03/2016, Two papers accepted to CVPR'16.
[Honor & Support] 02/2016, I received the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Graduates Abroad, for both academic and research excellences.
[Publicity & Service] 02/2016, I was elected as an online organization committee member of VALSE.
[Travel & Talk] 02/2016, I attended AAAI'16, in Phoenix, AZ, and presented two papers.
[Honor & Support] 01/2016, I acknowledged Microsoft for their donation of three Microsoft Bands II, to support my research on deep learning applied to healthcare data analytics.
[Publication] 01/2016, my co-authored book became available on Amazon.com: "Sparse Coding and Its Applications in Computer Vision".
[Honor & Support] 12/2015, I received the AAAI scholarship, and was selected as a "finalist" for the AAAI best student paper presentation competition.
[Honor & Support] 12/2015, I acknowledged NVidia for their donation of One Titan X GPU card, to support my research on deep learning applied to food dietary assessment.
[Publication] 12/2015, One paper accepted to SDM'16.
[Travel & Talk] 12/2015, I gave an invited talk to CS@UTSA through webinar, hosted by Prof. Qi Tian.
[Honor & Support] 11/2015, I received the highly competitive and prestigious Baidu Research Fellowship, among a total of 10 global recipients.
[Publication] 11/2015, Two papers accepted to AAAI'16.
[Travel & Talk] 11/2015, I gave invited talks in MSRA, Baidu Research, and EEIS@USTC.
[Publicity & Service]11/2015, DeepFont was extensively covered by media, including UIUC ECE Headline News, among many others.
[Travel & Talk] 10/2015, I attended ACM MM'15, in Brisbane, Australia, to present one full (oral) paper and one technical demo, both about DeepFont.
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A Bit About Me

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, CSE@TAMU, 2017- present. [Check Ph.D. openings in my research group]
Ph.D., ECE@UIUC (2016). B.E., EEIS@USTC (2012).
Highly motivated researcher, in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, image processing, and optimization.
Co-authored 5+ journal papers, 30+ conference & workshop papers, and 1 book. [Google Scholar]
Co-held 3 granted patents.
Internship with Microsoft Research Redmond (2015), Adobe Research (2014), and US Army Research Lab (2013).
Received 15+ scholarships and awards.
Research covered by BBC, Fortune, IBT, UIUC news, etc.