Qun Feng Tan

Blindfold solving all official Rubik's puzzles:

Speedsolving the 9x9 Rubik's Cube:

Check out a robot Rubik's Cube solver I built (10 hours build time):

Google Scholar Profile

Education

• University of Southern California
  Aug 2008 – May 2013 (defended March 2013)
  Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
  GPA: 4.00/4.00
• Stanford University
  Sept 2006 – June 2008
  M.S. in Electrical Engineering
  GPA: 3.93/4.00
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  Sept 2004 – June 2006
  B.S.E in Electrical Engineering and minor in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude)
  GPA: 3.93/4.00

Academic Emphasis: Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Large Datasets, Speech processing, Natural Language Processing, Information Theory, Convex Optimization, Estimation Theory, Probability Theory, Compressive Sensing, and many other things...

Programming Skills

• Programming Language Usage: C++, C, C#, Scripting languages, Java, HTML/CSS
• Speech Related: Moses (Machine Translation), HTK (Automatic Speech Recognition), SRILM, OpenFST

Languages Spoken/Writing/Reading: English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Malay

Languages Spoken: Hokkien, Taiwanese, Hakka, Indonesian

Teaching Assistant experience
Teaching Assistant Evaluation Results (Students' feedback and ratings) for EE 483 (Digital Signal Processing) Spring 2012 Semester.

Rating is on scale from 1 to 5 (5 being the best score).

Obtained perfect (5 out of 5) overall ratings.

Selected Publications (as first author)
Peer Reviewed Journals [Google Scholar Profile]

1. “Novel Variations of Group Sparse Regularization Techniques with Applications to Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition” – IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 1337 –1346, May 2012 [preprint]
2. “Enhanced Sparse Imputation Techniques for a Robust Speech Recognition Front-End” – IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, vol. 19, no. 8, pp. 2418 – 2429, 2011 [preprint]

Peer Reviewed Conferences

1. “Combining Window Predictions Efficiently - A New Imputation Approach For Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition” – ICASSP 2013 [preprint]
2. “Automatic Speech Recognition System Channel Modeling” – Interspeech 2010 [preprint]

• Student member of IEEE (2012)
• Reviewer for Symposium on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2012)

Other Interests

➨ Click for method to solve the Rubiks cube really fast

Non-Sighted Rubik Solving Videos (older content when I was in my teens)

Video 1: Solving the Rubiks Cube behind my back

Solving the cube behind my back in 3 min 30 seconds (time including memorization). Memorization took 60 seconds. (Filmed March 2006)

1) My friend scrambles the cube
2) Memorization takes place (60 seconds - Not filmed since the Canon camera at that time has a video time limit of 3 min)
3) Solving behind my back (2 min 30 seconds)
4) Done

Video 2: Blindfold Solving Video

Solving the cube blindfolded in 2 minutes 37 seconds (time including memorization). Memorization took 52 seconds. (Filmed Dec 11, 2005)

1) I scramble the cube on spot
2) Memorization takes place (52 seconds)
3) Donning the blindfold
4) Solving while blindfolded
5) Done