08/28/2023
By Ian Chen

The first Computer Science talk for Fall 2023 will be given by Rong Zheng from McMaster University. Zheng will share her recent research on multi-target visual tracking. The details are below and in the attachment:

Title: Accelerating Multi-Target Visual Tracking on Smart Edge Devices
Location: DAN (Dandeneau Hall) 321, North Campus
Date: Friday, Sept. 1, 2023
Time: 11 a.m. to noon

Abstract: Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a key building block in video analytics and finds extensive use in surveillance, search and rescue, and autonomous driving applications. Object detection, a crucial stage in MOT, dominates in the overall tracking inference time due to its reliance on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the superior performance of cutting-edge object detectors, their extensive computational demands limit their real-time application on embedded devices that possess constrained processing capabilities. Hence, it is important to reduce the computational burdens of object detection while maintaining tracking performance. In this talk, I will discuss three approaches we developed toward this goal: 1) DeepScale, a model-agnostic frame resolution selection approach, 2) AttTrack to expedite tracking by interleaving the execution of object detectors of different model sizes in inference and transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a smaller network (student) at run time, and 3) MVSparse, a distributed cooperative pipeline for pedestrian tracking that exploits the spatial and temporal redundancy within and across the video feeds from multiple synchronized cameras.

Bio: Rong Zheng received her Ph.D. degree from Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her M.E. and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, P.R. China. She is now a Professor in the Dept. of Computing and Software. She was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, University of Houston from 2004 to 2012. Rong Zheng’s research interests include mobile computing, data analytics and networked systems. She is currently Tier-1 Canada research chair in Mobile Computing. She was recognized as having an established, superior research program that is highly rated in terms of originality and innovation, and was awarded the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement in 2019. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006, and was a Joseph Ip Distinguished Engineering Fellow from 2015 - 2018. Dr. Zheng is currently an editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile computing. She has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Dr. Zheng was on the organization committee of MobiSys 2020 and SenSys 2019, and served as Technical program co-chair of WASA’12, CPSCom’12, MobileHealth’14, CrowdSenSys’17, IEEE Smart IoT'20, SenSys 2021, and general co-chair of EUC’16. She serves on the technical program committees of leading networking and mobile computing conferences including SenSys, INFOCOM, ICDCS, ICNP, RTSS, IPSN etc.