UCSB Computer Science Assistant Professor William Wang receives an Adobe Faculty Research Award for his research on language and vision. Every year, Adobe funds a university faculty research program to promote the understanding and use of data science in the area of marketing. The goal is to encourage both theoretical and empirical development of solutions to problems in marketing.

In his recent CVPR 2018 work led by Ph.D. students Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, and Jiawei Wu, the research team aims to address the challenge of video captioning by proposing a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, where a high-level Manager module learns to design sub-goals and a low-level Worker module recognizes the primitive actions to fulfill the sub-goal. With this compositional framework to reinforce video captioning at different levels, this approach significantly outperforms all the baseline methods on a newly introduced large-scale dataset for fine-grained video captioning. Furthermore, the proposed non-ensemble model has already achieved the state-of-the-art results on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.

About the company: Adobe Systems Incorporated, commonly known as Adobe, is an American multinational computer software company. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States. Adobe has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent foray towards rich Internet application software development. It is best known for Photoshop, an image editing software, Acrobat Reader, the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Adobe Creative Suite, as well as its successor Adobe Creative Cloud.