The Technograph

Scientists and engineers are never short of new ideas, and the talented students at the University of Illinois are no exception. Though research and development usually takes place in labs scattered across campus, student innovators at UIUC now have an arena to showcase their inventions to the public and gain recognition for their work. The Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize is awarded each year to an undergraduate or graduate student that has created or improved a product or process, according to the Lemelson-Illinois Prize website. The winner receives $30,000, and is chosen by a multi-disciplinary panel of engineers, scientists, entrepreneurship and intellectual property experts, and others.

This year’s winner, John Wright, was recently awarded the Prize for his work on facial recognition systems. A graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wright developed a new system that radically improves identification accuracy. Previous systems compared a test image to a variety of training images one at a time to determine a match. Wright’s new approach utilizes advanced mathematics from an area called sparsest representation to improve the process. In this method, the training images are grouped in a large “dictionary” used to explain the test image. The image that uses the fewest number of training images - the “sparsest” one - is chosen. With 91% accuracy, Wright’s invention has applications in security, photo organization, and social networking, and has already been licensed to several companies.

Wright became interested in face recognition two years ago during a visit to Microsoft Research Asia, where he was inspired to pursue new fields of applied mathematics, including sparsest representation. “We were somewhat surprised by how well [the sparsest representation approach] worked…understanding this required a lot of new analysis,” he said. Practical obstacles had to be overcome in the process. Wright encountered problems with misaligned images, acquiring good training data, and slimming the computing time to a reasonable length. Though the winning system addressed these problems, he says that improvements to the system are already in progress to develop faster computing, more scalable implementations and better hardware acquisition devices.

Wright credits the courses at the University of Illinois for providing a solid foundation for his research. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the ECE department at UIUC and says that “I became a much more engaged student after doing undergraduate research…seeing how the theory can be used to do things you might have never thought possible.” For those interested in research, Wright recommends an early start. “My best advice is to get involved in as early as possible, and to find a topic they are passionate about,” he said. “That, and be persistent…students have no idea how busy [and] distracted their professors actually are.”

Aspiring inventors with their eye on next year’s Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize can find out more information at http://30kprize.illinois.edu/.

Tagged with: Lemelson, prize, contest, student, Microsoft