News

WNCG students Marius Facktor and Abhinau Venkataramanan and WNCG alumnus Praful Gupta from Prof. Al Bovik’s Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) have been named Phase 2 winners in the Enhancing Computer Vision for Public Safety Challenge. The challenge is hosted by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The competition aims to support public safety missions by advancing computer vision algorithms and no-reference (NR) metrics that assess image or video quality.

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.”

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.