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Jia Deng Receives Google Faculty Research Award to Study Relationships Between Entities in Images
Prof. Deng’s primary research interest is in the area of computer vision, with a focus on image and video understanding, human computation, and large-scale machine learning.
EnlargeAssistant Professor Jia Deng has been awarded a 2015 Google Faculty Research Award for his work in large-scale image understanding.
His proposal, entitled “Beyond Entities: Understanding Relations in Images,” aims to advance image understanding in terms of recognizing the relationships present between multiple entities in images. This would include actions, such as “a person eating cake” and spatial relationships, such as “a keyboard on top of desk.”
The development of such an image understanding system would enable image retrieval for complex or arbitrary queries, such as “is there a person standing on a red chair and fixing the light?” It would also enable the generation of rich image descriptions.
Prof. Deng’s primary research interest is in the area of computer vision, with a focus on image and video understanding, human computation, and large-scale machine learning. In particular, he tackles large-scale computer vision challenges by leveraging big visual data – the massive amount of images and videos made available by digital cameras, mobile devices, and the Internet.
He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2012 and his B.Eng. from Tsinghua University, both in computer science. He joined the faculty at Michigan in September 2013. His work has been featured in popular press such as the New York Times and MIT Technology Review. He is a recipient of the Yahoo ACE Award, the ICCV Marr Prize, and the ECCV Best Paper Award. He has been co-organizing the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) since 2010. He was also the lead organizer of the BigVision workshops at NIPS 2012 and CVPR 2014.
About the Google Faculty Research Award
The Google Faculty Research Awards program is a competitive worldwide program intended to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia. The intent of the awards program is to support academic research that is aligned with Google’s mission. The awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.