Autobiography

This is Jenn-Jier James Lien （the lab website is: http://robotics.csie.ncku.edu.tw). I am a professor at department of computer science and information engineering (CSIE), National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). I am also the vice chairman of CSIE and director of institute of manufacturing and information systems at NCKU. I serve the deputy secretary-general for Chinese Institute of automation Engineers (CIAE), TAIWAN.

I received my bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Chung Yuan Christian University, TAIWAN, in 1989. The title of my independent study is “Laser Acupuncture Design”. After finishing the military service in TAIWAN in 1991, I went to U.S.A. and studied at department of electrical engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, from 1991 to 1993. My independent study title is “Diagnosis of Ultrasonic Imaging System: Hardware and Software” under the supervision of professor William Richard. For my Ph.D. career, I obtained National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) research assistant scholarship from the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. One of my advisors is professor Takeo Kanade, who is the member of National Academy of Engineering and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the other advisor is professor Jeffrey Cohn from department of psychology and psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh. In 1998, I completed my Ph.D. degree and the title of the dissertation was “Automatic Recognition of Facial Expressions Using Hidden Markov Models and Estimation of Expression Intensity". This research work was to analyze and recognize the motion of facial expression in detail and encode facial muscle motion by using Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This work was published at Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR, 1998) conference, which is one of top conferences in CVPR fields, and then published in high-quality journals: Psychology (1999) and Journal of Robotics and Automation (1999).

From 1999 to 2002, I worked at a startup company, Visionics Corporation, at Jersey City, New Jersey. Our R&D team won the championships of DARPA FERET Face Recognition Competitions in 2000 and 2002. In 2000, I led one small team and we obtained US$5 Millions research grant from DARPA surveillance project: Human Identification at a Distance (HID). We developed one real-time stereo system for face recognition at a distance. In august, 2002, I went back to TAIWAN and joined the department of CSIE at NCKU to be an assistant professor. From 2004 to 2008, except the academic works, the major research work of my students and I was to develop the automatic optical inspection (AOI) technology. We cooperated with Tongtai Machine & Tool Co. Ltd, TFT-LCD companies (AUO and Chi-Mei), and solar cell companies (MoTech Industries, Inc. and E- Ton Solar Tech). From 2009 to 2014, we developed the embedded computer vision technology for the markets of surveillance, human-computer interactions (HCI), and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). We cooperated with Texas Instruments (IC design company in U.S.A.), Faraday Technology Corp. (IC design company), and Advantech (embedded computing & automation company). Since 2014, we worked toward developing the deep learning application algorithms for the fields of structured light 3D inspection and reconstruction, visual-based robot arm grasping, and tool wear monitoring and life prediction in industry 4.0. Our cooperation companies consist of Tongtai Machine & Tool Co., Ltd., and Hiwin Technology Corp. (robot and robot arm manufacturing company) in Taiwan.

I have around 20 graduate students at my Robotics Lab. Around 2014, we started to apply deep learning algorithms to image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition for our biomedical-related grant projects. Recently, we have 5 biomedical- related grant projects. We cooperate with 1) MDIC at NCKU for the MOST AI biomedical grant project named “Development of the Elderly Health Promotion System and the Value Chain in Long-term Care,” 2) Musculoskeletal Research Center (MRC) at NCKU for the project “Smart Medical Device - Development of AI/Precision Medicine Based Rehabilitation System,” 3) local company for the medical device project “Reverse Engineering - 3D Tooth Model Reconstruction Using Structured Light,” 4) local company for the augmented reality (AR) eyeglasses project “Application of Augmented Reality (AR) Eyeglasses,” and 5) local company for the visual-guided robot arm control project “Robot Arm Control Using Visual-Based Deep Learning.”