Sung-Pil Paek
[Introduction]
This statement applies for admission to the Ph.D. program in Department of Computer Science and Engineering of UCSD, specifically, to continue my study in computer vision as a subfield. I indeed am interested in recognizing, identifying, and detecting the real world through computers in particular with visual information. Based on an understanding of our surroundings of life, I always enjoy replacing the time-consuming, hectic works with computer software and let it be a better choice than other routine works. Hence, I am fascinated to deal with automatic annotations and tracking of images or videos, which are my current research interests.
When I was a student …show more content…
So, I should introduce an extracurricular activity, which also gave an effect on me up to now, as college’s student ambassador named ‘Yeoul’. Not only was this one of the most precious participation in my life, it also pushed me to hone fundamental aptitudes. In the activity, I was likely to be a teacher because I needed to present information in ways others easily understood. As a representative of our decent college, I needed to know more about our school than anyone else, and I needed to explain the facts more easily than anyone else. Furthermore, I naturally met many people and various types of people from elementary school students to foreign university presidents. By meeting so many people, I was able to overcome my introverted personal traits and let myself socialize with my colleagues. Indeed, I have become confident and comfortable in expressing whatever I have in my mind. Above all, I had devoted myself to the job over total six hundred hours, which I am proud …show more content…
in computer vision area. UCSD supports the computer vision research with tremendous resources and attention by launching the Center for Visual Computing in April 2015. Since the center is also sponsored from well-known media and tech companies, there is no doubt that it has the potential for major societal impact. Among many research labs in the center, I would like to work particularly with Professor David Kriegman. His researches on computer vision indeed apply to many areas such as social networks (urban tribes) and coral ecology (benthic survey). In the latter, I have enjoyed reading a recent paper about automatic annotations of coral reefs from large-scale benthic survey images. The paper reported that reflectance images itself won’t always contain sufficient information for proper classification of coral reefs, and further suggested to combine those reflectance images with fluorescence images to obtain more accurate results. This discovery is spectacular for its originality, utility, and extendibility relatively to other ecological applications. As my intense interest in computer vision was introduced earlier, I am confident that I can contribute to Professor Kriegman’s diverse researches in attaining achievements during my Ph.D. study if the chance is provided. Upon graduation, I am eager to be a professional researcher dedicating the