Prof. Biing Hwang (Fred) Juang visited Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) on March 23, 2017. Prof. Juang is the Motorola Foundation Chair Professor and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at Georgia Institute of Technology. He was elected an IEEE Fellow (1991), a Bell Labs Fellow (1999), a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (2004), and an Academician of the Academia Sinica (2006) and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2014). He gave a lecture "Deep Neural Networks from a Developmental Perspective" at CASIA.
There is a recent surge in research activities around the idea of the so-called "deep neural networks (DNN)". As a technical item, DNN without a doubt is an important classroom topic and several tutorial articles and related learning resources are available. However, Prof. Juang proposed that streams of questions about DNN never subside from students or researchers and there appears to be a frustrating tendency among the learners to treat DNN simply as a black box. In this talk, Prof. Juang used pedagogy to attempt with the aim to present DNN in the well-established traditional pattern recognition framework so that a deeper understanding of DNN can be reached through proper contrast to conventional techniques, such as Bayesian decision and Markov random field. In particular, He also reviewed the developmental aspect of DNN, in terms of how advances in connectionist models have evolved into this powerful technique.
Prof. Juang is enlisted as Honorary Chair Professor at several renowned universities. Prof. Juang's notable accomplishments include development of vector quantization for voice applications, voice coders at extremely low bit rates (800 bps and ~300 bps), robust vocoders for satellite communications, fundamental algorithms in signal modeling for automatic speech recognition, mixture hidden Markov models, discriminative methods in pattern recognition and machine learning, stereo- and multi-phonic teleconferencing, and a number of voice-enabled interactive communication services. Prof. Juang has published extensively, including the book "Fundamentals of Speech Recognition", co-authored with L.R. Rabiner, and holds nearly two dozen patents. He received the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1998 for contributions to the field of speech processing and communications and the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE in 2000. He was named recipient of the IEEE Field Award in Audio, Speech and Acoustics, the J.L. Flanagan Medal.
Prof. Juang Gives Leture at CASIA