The IFP Group was founded by Professor Thomas S. Huang (1936 - 2020) in the 80s, started as Image Formation and Processing Group at Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. - Over the years, the IFP Group has pursued research and innovation beyond images, inlcuding Image and Video Coding, Multimodal Human Computer Interaction, Multimedia Annotation and Search, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Big Data, Deep Learning and High Performance Computing. + Over the years, the IFP Group has pursued research and innovation beyond images, including Image and Video Coding, Multimodal Human Computer Interaction, Multimedia Annotation and Search, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Big Data, Deep Learning and High Performance Computing. The current IFP research direction is to solve problems in multimodal information processing by synergistically combining Big Data, Deep Learning, and High Performance Computing. IFP has been famous for having an environment conducive to innovative/independent research. Of course, most of the research projects need eventually align with the main research theme.