Pursuit of Low-dimensional Structures in High-dimensional Data
Yi Ma
Professor
Visual Computing Group, MSRA and Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss a new 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 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. These results and tools actually generalize to a large family of low-complexity structures whose associated (convex) regularizers are decomposable. 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 web documents, image tags, microarray data, audio/music analysis, and graphical models.
This is joint work with John Wright of Columbia, Emmanuel Candes of Stanford, Zhouchen Lin of Peking University, and my students Zhengdong Zhang, Xiao Liang of Tsinghua University, Arvind Ganesh, Zihan Zhou, Kerui Min and Hossein Mobahi of UIUC.
Bio: Yi Ma is a Principal Researcher and the Research Manager of the Visual Computing group at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing since January 2009. Before that he was a professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research interest is in computer vision, high-dimensional data analysis, and systems theory. He is the first author of the popular vision textbook “An Invitation to 3-D Vision," published by Springer in 2003. 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 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 was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) from 2007 to 2011. He is currently an associate editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), the IMA journal on Information and Inference, SIAM journal on Imaging Sciences, and IEEE transactions on Information Theory. He has served as the chief guest editor for special issues for the Proceedings of IEEE and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He will also serve as Program Chair for ICCV 2013 and General Chair for ICCV 2015. He is a Fellow of IEEE.