3/31/2008 Lauren Eichmann, ECE Illinois
Fourth year ECE PhD candidate Raymond Yun Fu has been named a recipient of the 2007 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. The award, announced this month, recognizes students across all research-based doctoral degree fields in 31 countries.
Written by Lauren Eichmann, ECE Illinois
Fourth year ECE PhD candidate Raymond Yun Fu has been named a recipient of the 2007 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. The award, announced this month, recognizes students across all research-based doctoral degree fields in 31 countries. This year, Fu is one of three awardees from Illinois.
"I feel excited and honored," said Fu. "This is an important award and a great honor for me, especially when I get recognized by my home country, China. This award is not easy to get."
Awardees are selected on academic merit and research achievements after three rounds of judging by invited experts from their field in China as well as their host country.
Fu said there were several reasons he chose to come to Illinois to pursue his doctoral degree. "First, [Illinois] has a very good reputation in academia, especially with its top-ranking engineering school," he said. "Second, my current supervisor is a very famous professor in my research field. He is leading an innovative group doing interdisciplinary research. I am proud and lucky to join the group under [Thomas Huang’s] supervision."
Fu’s research interests include statistical machine learning, human computer interaction, image processing and multimedia. "Specifically, my current research is to design a general framework of discriminative subspace learning and apply it to several real-world applications on facial image analysis - such as face recognition, head pose estimation, expression/emotion analysis, human age estimation, and lip-reading," he said.
He also has had much of his research published, and acts as a reviewer in top journals and participant in international conferences and workshops. Fu was the recipient of the 2002 Rockwell Automation Master of Science Award, two Edison Cups of the 2002 General Electric Fund Edison Cup Technology Innovation Competition, the 2003 Hewlett-Packard (HP) Silver Medal and Science Scholarship for Excellent Chinese Student, the 2007 DoCoMo USA Labs Innovative Paper Award, the 2007-2008 Beckman Graduate Fellowship from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and the 2008 M. E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award.
He said he plans to graduate this summer and is looking for a faculty position in academia where he will continue his current Beckman Graduate Fellow project to research tough real-world problems in biomedical imaging, such as cancer detection by multimodality image fusion.
Fu will receive a certificate and $5,000 cash prize at an award ceremony to be held this summer in Chicago by the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China. He will be joined by the other award recipients, including those from Illinois - Jiajie Diao of physics and Jizhou Song, a recent mechanical engineering graduate. More information about the scholarship can be found on the China Scholarship Council Web site at www.csc.edu.cn/en.