Jing Wang shortlisted for ICT Pioneers Competition
Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:34:00 BST
Computers able to extract and analyse information from video footage could have an important role to play in many fields, including security. Research carried out by University of Huddersfield doctoral student Jing Wang is hastening this breakthrough. And now he has had the opportunity to impress a panel of experts with the significance of his work.
He was shortlisted for one of the awards at the 2011 ICT Pioneers Competition, taking place in London, and he finished second in his category (Technology Tsunami) out of 25 in the demanding contest.
China-born Jing, aged 28, faced a succession of probing questions from judges about his work and the benefits it could bring to industry and society as a whole.
The other 24 shortlisted candidates in the competition – which is organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - are mostly from the Russell Group universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, Manchester, and Warwick.
Jing Wang’s research deals with computer video-based event detection. It means that a computer can be programmed to understand what is happening in video footage. For example, a person at an airport terminal might drop a bag and run away – a computer could be enabled to detect the unusual nature of the occurrence and sound an alarm.
Jing’s techniques also enable a computer to scan video footage and extract certain types of visual information. It would mean less drudgery for human operators.
Before he resumed academic research, Jing Wang worked for a Beijing-based company Pansino as a development engineer, working on machine vision systems. Then he decided to study for a PhD and came to the University of Huddersfield, where he is in his third year, supervised by Dr. Zhijie Xu, himself a pioneer in computer graphics.
Jing Wang said: “I chose Huddersfield because it is such a good place to study, with a very good environment for research and a very powerful supervisory team”.
