Northeastern professor recognized with IEEE Early Career Award

Raymond Fu designs algorithms capable of rapidly analyzing photos and videos on Facebook. Photo by Brooks Canaday.
Northeastern’s Yun Raymond Fu, a professor with an interdisciplinary appointment in CCIS and the College of Engineering, will receive an Outstanding Early Career Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computational Intelligence Society next year.

According to the IEEE website, the award recognizes researchers who have “contributed to the advancement of theory, technologies, and/or applications of computational intelligence through inventions, new technologies, innovative technical developments [and] new product implementations.” Fu is no stranger to recognition from his field. Just last year, he was the recipient of three Young Investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office and the International Neural Network Society.

“[Two of] the previous young investigator awards were from government,” Fu says. “This one is from my society, which means I got more recognition. It means more in terms of my field.”
In order to receive the IEEE CIS award, researchers must be nominated by a peer. The nomination is supported by several references from other experts in the field, and the nominee’s portfolio is also considered in the process, as are his or her history of achievements and service to the society. Fu will receive the award at a conference in Vancouver next year.

At present, Fu’s work, which includes several government contracts, is based around machine learning, data mining and computer vision. For a current project, Fu scans pictures and videos people share on social media. Based on those images and videos, he tries to build a profile of that person: their age, gender, background and interests. Through inference conducted by automatic analytics, Fu also tries to recognize the outcome of long videos: for example, whether a bag left alone in an airport by a person caught on video poses a security threat or not.

“This is particularly for social media analytics and government interest, for when they try to look into social networks of criminals or terrorists to see how they expand their network, what kind of people they are,” he explains.

And when it comes to his dual responsibilities as researcher and professor, Fu says that for him, the two form a complete circle.

“Research has motivated me because a lot of new findings can actually be very interesting, he says. “That’s motivated me to continue to do research. But in the meanwhile, when I have those findings, I want to share it with young people, with students. That’s a circle.”