Chen Liu

As a principal research scientist at one of the biggest technology companies in the world, Chen Liu has a window into the future. That future, according to the former Beckman Fellow, gets closer every time we perform a search or download a file to our computers.

When the transistor age ushered in electronic signal processing in the 1950s and eventually led to the information technology era of today, it created a vast mountain of data that continues to accumulate in servers and hard drives worldwide. Liu said the next information technology phase is now being built around two key elements: managing all that data and putting it to use, especially in the area of artificial intelligence.

“We are entering an era of how to deal with this data, to use, search for, and retrieve data. To get access to data anywhere, anytime,” Liu said. “The trend will be pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining.

“Another thing is the intelligence area. Both in academia and industry we are doing things like intelligent cars, intelligent homes. In my lab we develop user interfaces, with a focus on phones, but also on very general research. We definitely need students with new knowledge, like in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

This, of course, means more opportunities for students in the new data era Liu describes. Those opportunities, he says, won’t just be for computer science or engineering majors.

“When we enter this data era, psychology is definitely a big component of that,” Liu said. “In this lab we have a bunch of scientists in EE and CS, but we find more and more situations where we need to collaborate with linguists and psychologists.”

A student interested in these areas should listen up. Consider that Liu is someone who knows firsthand about being in the right place at the right time and about taking advantage of opportunity. Through his own efforts and a little serendipitous luck, Liu made the most of a one-time chance at the Beckman Institute and eventually earned a coveted position at Motorola Labs.

In 1995 Chen Liu was more than 6,500 miles from Illinois, thinking about how to use the capability certain animals had to pick out individual sounds from a noisy environment in his auditory signal processing research. At the same time a Beckman Institute researcher was pondering how to translate that same ability into something useful for human beings.

It now seems natural for the two quests to become one, but at the time Liu was in Israel doing doctoral work at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He was searching the scientific literature for researchers who could help find a way to deal with the so-called “cocktail party” problem in audio signal processing.

Liu’s aim was to localize and extract a single sound in the presence of multiple interfering sounds – in other words, the kind of environments often found at a cocktail party. That search led him to Beckman’s Al Feng, and to an abrupt change in his life.