Contemporary Visual Computing: Storytelling & Scene Graph Generation Professor

Prof. Chang Wen Chen The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Visual computing, traditionally, is a generic term for all computer science disciplines for algorithmic development dealing with images, videos, and other types of visual data. This talk shall focus on contemporary visual computing design from several systematic perspectives. Contemporary visual computing has been substantially advanced to enhance both human understanding and machine intelligence. The ultimate goal for human understanding will be for visual computing algorithms to generate human-like storytelling with a rational contextual setting and the capability to apply general knowledge. For machine intelligence, a more appropriate form of representing semantics embedded in visual data will be to utilize a wellstructured scene graph generation approach to characterize the logical relationship among the subjects and objects detected from the visual data. We shall report our recent research activities in developing advanced visual computing algorithms for both human understanding and machine intelligence. These exemplary applications demonstrate several unique visual computing capabilities in understanding the real world with more accurate contextual and environmental interpretations. These examples also illustrate the technical challenges we are facing and the potential significant impacts that contemporary visual computing system design may have on future technological revolutions. In particular, the unique perspective of structured Scene Graph Generation in 6G semantic communication may provide an intrinsic insight for further development in integrating visual computing technologies into next-generation mobile communication networks.

Chang Wen Chen is currently Chair Professor of Visual Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before his current position, he served as Dean of the School of Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen from 2017 to 2020, and concurrently as Deputy Director at Peng Cheng Laboratory from 2018 to 2021. Previously, he has been an Empire Innovation Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) from 2008 to 2021 and the Allan Henry Endowed Chair Professor at the Florida Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2007. He has served as an Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. Multimedia (2014-2016) and IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2006-2009). He has received many professional achievement awards, including ten (10) Best Paper Awards in premier publication venues, the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Award in 2010, the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2016, and UIUC ECE Distinguished Alumni Award in 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, an SPIE Fellow, and a Member of the Academia Europaea.