Kevin Tang
Undergraduate Student
Email:
kt258@domain.edu
(where 'domain' = 'cornell')
Contact Info:
Telephone: (607)229-2175
About Me:
I'm currently a senior (Class of 2010) at Cornell University. I'm a double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS), and will be applying to PhD programs in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science this year.
I was born in Mountain View, CA, although I've spent most of my life living in Hsinchu and Taipei, Taiwan. I love music, and enjoy playing saxophone, piano, guitar, and flute. I also actively play basketball, tennis, and badminton. In addition, I am president of the Cornell Taiwanese American Society (CTAS). To learn more about me, take a look at my resume.
Research Interests:
I'm primarily interested in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, in particular, the high-level vision tasks of recognition. From a broader perspective, I'm interested in applying theoretical algorithms and ideas from my Computer Science background to application areas and problems from my Electrical and Computer Engineering background. I'm also interested in the modeling and analysis of complex networks, such as computer networks and social networks.
Research Projects:
Previously, I did work in computer networks and systems under the guidance of Professor Paul Francis and Saikat Guha. With them, I worked on problems related to mobile ad-hoc networks, privacy in online social networks, and measuring internet advertisements. In the work involving online social networks, we designed and built a new system, "NOYB" ("None Of Your Business"), that effectively protects privacy in facebook profiles using ciphers. Together with Saikat, I also built a system to collect advertisements data from Google's search engine for analysis on the current status of advertisements on the web.
I also spent the summer before my junior year working with Professor Robert Keller at Harvey Mudd College on problems related to machine learning, and its application to the area of jazz improvisation. During that summer, we improved upon the functionality of Impro-Visor, which is a jazz educational software. The specific functionality that I worked on was with regards to learning how to generate jazz solos that effectively emulate the style of a given professional player.
Recently, I have begun doing work with Professor Tsuhan Chen, as well as graduate students Dhruv Batra and Adarsh Kowdle, on problems related to designing novel interfaces for vision related problems, and probabilistic distance metrics. I developed a front-end user-friendly system used to implement a segmentation algorithm, using touch-screen support from the HP Touchsmart.
This summer, I am working with Professor Marshall Tappen and Dr. Rahul Sukthankar at the University of Central Florida on a project related to transfer learning for one-shot recognition.
For results produced from my research work, please see my publications section below.
Publications:
Saikat Guha, Alexey Reznichenko, Kevin Tang, Hamed Haddadi, Paul Francis. "Serving Ads from localhost for Performance, Privacy, and Profit," Proceedings of Hot Topics in Networking (HotNets '09), New York, NY, October 2009. [pdf]
Jonathan Gillick, Kevin Tang, Robert Keller. "Learning Jazz Grammars," 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC '09), Porto, Portugal, July 2009. [pdf]
Dhruv Batra, Adarsh Kowdle, Kevin Tang, Devi Parikh, Jiebo Luo, Tsuhan Chen. "Interactive Cosegmentation by Touch," Demo Session at Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2009 (CVPR '09), Miami Beach, FL, June 2009. [project page]
Saikat Guha, Kevin Tang, and Paul Francis. "NOYB: Privacy in Online Social Networks," Proceedings of The First ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN '08), Seattle, WA, August 2008. [pdf]