Low-dimensional Structures and Deep Models for High-dimensional Data

Yi Ma

EECS Department, UC Berkeley

Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss a class of models and techniques that can effectively model and extract rich low-dimensional structures in high-dimensional data such as images and videos, despite nonlinear transformation, gross corruption, or severely compressed measurements. This work leverages recent advancements in convex optimization from Compressive Sensing for recovering low-rank or sparse signals that provide both strong theoretical guarantees and efficient and scalable algorithms for solving such high-dimensional combinatorial problems. We illustrate how these new mathematical models and tools could bring disruptive changes to solutions to many challenging tasks in computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. We will also illustrate some emerging applications of these tools to other data types such as 3D range data, web documents, image tags, bioinformatics data, audio/music analysis, etc. Throughout the talk, we will discuss strong connections of algorithms from Compressive Sensing with other popular data-driven methods such as Deep Neural Networks, providing some new perspectives to understand Deep Learning.

This is joint work with John Wright of Columbia, Emmanuel Candes of Stanford, Zhouchen Lin of Peking University, Shenghua Gao of ShanghaiTech, and my former students Zhengdong Zhang of MIT, Xiao Liang of Tsinghua University, Arvind Ganesh, Zihan Zhou, Kerui Min of UIUC.

Brief Biography: Yi Ma is a professor at the EECS Department of UC Berkeley. He has been a professor and the executive dean of the School of Information and Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, China from 2014 to 2017. From 2009 to early 2014, he was a Principal Researcher and the Research Manager of the Visual Computing group at Microsoft Research in Beijing. From 2000 to 2011, he was an assistant and associate professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research interest is in computer vision, data science, and systems theory. Yi Ma received his Bachelors’ degree in Automation and Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) in 1995, a Master of Science degree in EECS in 1997, a Master of Arts degree in Mathematics in 2000, and a PhD degree in EECS in 2000, all from the University of California at Berkeley. Yi Ma received the David Marr Best Paper Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision 1999, the Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Prize (honorable mention) at the European Conference on Computer Vision 2004, and the Sang Uk Lee Best Student Paper Award with his students at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision in 2009. He also received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2004 and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2005. He has written two textbooks: “An Invitation to 3-D Vision” published in 2004, and “Generalized Principal Component Analysis” published in 2016, all by Springer. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), and IEEE transactions on Information Theory (TIT). He is currently an associate editor of the IMA journal on Information and Inference, SIAM journal on Imaging Sciences, SIAM journal on Mathematics of Data Science, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He has served as a Program Chair for ICCV 2013 and a General Chair for ICCV 2015. He is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM. He is ranked the World's Highly Cited Researchers of 2016 by Clarivate Analytics of Thomson Reuters and is among Top 50 of the Most Influential Authors in Computer Science of the World, ranked by Semantic Scholar, reported by Science Magazine, April 2016.