News

This Spring, WNCG welcomes Intel, NEC, and Western Digital as the newest WNCG Industrial Affiliates Program members. All three companies enter as Level 2 members. Since WNCG’s founding, the Industrial Affiliates Program has played a vital role in the group’s success. It facilitates “cooperation and mutual assistance” between WNCG and Affiliate companies. This collaboration between academia and industry embodies the group’s mission to “support research, provide highly relevant education and opportunities, [and] promote technical innovation, imagination and entrepreneurship.”

Texas ECE Professor Al Bovik’s neuroscience-based Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) picture quality measurement tool has been built into the core of Netflix’s quality system which controls the quality of every video streamed by Netflix to all customers world-wide. VIF is a full reference image quality assessment index that is based on natural scene statistics, and on a model of the type of image information that is extracted by the human visual system. It was developed by Prof.

Fujitsu Laboratories of America recently joined the WNCG Industrial Affiliate Program as a Level Two Member.

Toyota InfoTechnology Center, U.S.A. (Toyota ITC), recently joined the WNCG Industrial Affiliate Program as a level one member, and as a founding member of the UT SAVES research initiative.

Governmental regulations and privacy concerns restrict access to data sets for individuals and only provide researchers with data in aggregated form. However, current machine learning and data mining techniques are restricted in their ability to effectively use such data. These limitations create roadblocks for companies looking for ways to better respond to their consumers’ needs while also providing safety and security for individual users.