Title: Contemporary Visual Computing for 6G Semantic Communications

Speaker: Chang Wen Chen, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This talk shall focus on contemporary visual computing research trends with critical implications for 6G semantic communications. Semantic communication was initially proposed by Weaver and Shannon 70+ years ago in the early 1950s in which they outlined the classical definition of three levels of communications: the technical problem, the semantic problem, and the effectiveness problem. Until 5G, most researchers and practitioners have been working on the first technical problem. For 6G, semantic communication becomes necessary to handle the overwhelming volume of visual data among all IP traffic. We firmly believe that a paradigm-shifting framework needs to be designed to transport the volumetric visual data under the 6G mobile communication architecture. We show that recent technical advances in contemporary visual computing bear great potential for 6G semantic communication. Among the volumetric visual data, a significant portion of them has been acquired for machine intelligence purposes. Therefore, structured extraction and representation of the semantics from these visual data are desired to facilitate the 6G semantic communication.  For contemporary visual computing, the well-structured scene graph generation (SGG) approaches have been demonstrated capable of representing compactly the logical relationship among the subjects and objects detected from the visual data. We shall show that the unique capability of structured SGG can be applied to 6G semantic communication towards future advances in integrating visual computing with 6G.

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 received his BS degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1983, his MS degree from the University of Southern California in 1986, and his PhD degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in 1992.

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 (2005), a SPIE Fellow (2007), and a Member of the Academia Europaea (2021).