James Z. Wang's Research Group

Modeling Objects, Concepts, and Aesthetics in Images


What's New: December '11 -- Professor Wang gave a talk at the Mathematics: Muse, Maker, and Measure of the Arts workshop in Banff. (photos)
January '11 -- Professor James Wang assumed the position of Program Manager at the National Science Foundation.
August '10 -- With funding from the National Science Foundation, we initiated an international Climate Informatics Network.
June '10 -- Our aesthetics research was featured on TV with over 47 million viewers in the US and over 200 million viewers internationally. view the video


About the Group: Research interests of this group include automatic image tagging / recognition, climate informatics, biomedical informatics, computability of aesthetics and emotions, semantics-sensitive image retrieval, story picturing, art image analysis and retrieval, and image security. The group has published two monographs and more than 30 journal articles (g-scholar profile). Members of the group have served as referee for 60+ scientific journals in various related fields. The SIMPLIcity system Wang co-developed with Jia Li in 1999 has been sought after and obtained by researchers from over 100 institutions. Their recent work on real-time automatic linguistic indexing of pictures can be tested at alipr.com. The Acquine Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine developed by the group is available at acquine.alipr.com. Past Ph.D. students of the group have taken tenure-track faculty and research scientist positions, right after graduation from us. In the summers, students have participated in internships at AT&T Labs, Google, HP, IBM Research, IDIAP Switzerland, Kodak Research, Merck Research, NEC Research, SONY Research, Telefonica R&D Barcelona, Xerox PARC, and Yahoo!, among others.

Biography of the PI: James Z. Wang has been on Penn State faculty since 2000, where he is Professor of the interdisciplinary College of Information Sciences and Technology. He is also Affiliated Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Integrative Biosciences (IBIOS) Program (Option on Bioinformatics and Genomics, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences). He serves as the founding Co-Director of the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory (2001-) and a member of the I3C and CyberSTAR infrastructures (2002-). He has been a recipient of an NSF Career award (2004-2009) and the endowed PNC Foundation Technologies Career Development Professorship (2000-2006). He has served as the lead guest editor of IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Special Section on Real-world Image Annotation and Retrieval (2008), the General Chair of the ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) events (2006, 2007, and 2010, now named ICMR), an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2009-2011), and an invited speaker at more than 70 institutions. He was a Visiting Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University (2007-2008). In 2011 and 2012, he manages the China Program (OISE) in the Office of the National Science Foundation Director, heads the working group for the NSF-wide Catalyzing New International Collaborations program which supports science and technology collaborations worldwide, and is a member of the NSF Open Access policy-making working group. He has held visiting positions at IBM Almaden Research Center, SRI International, NEC Research, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wang holds a summa cum laude Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Minnesota, and an M.S. in Mathematics, an M.S. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences, all from Stanford University. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM. His Erdős number is 3.

US Patents Awarded to Inventors of the Group:
7,941,009 Real-time computerized annotation of pictures [May 10, 2011]
7,929,805 Image-based CAPTCHA generation system [April 19, 2011]
7,394,947 System and method for automatic linguistic indexing of images by a statistical modeling approach [July 1, 2008]
6,633,817 Sequence database search with sequence search trees [October 14, 2003]

PhD Study: information, apply now


(Spain, 2010, more photos)

James Z. Wang, Professor

313C IST Building, Penn State, University Park, PA 16802
jwang at ist dot psu dot edu, +1-814-865-7889, (fax) +1-814-865-6426
personal site

Program Manager [2011- ]

OISE, Office of the Director, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA 22203
jzwang at nsf dot gov, +1-703-292-8704, (fax) +1-703-292-9067

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.