The statistical visual computing laboratory (SVCL) at UCSD performs research in both fundamental and applied problems in computer vision, image processing, machine learning, and multimedia. The focus is on the development of intelligent systems, which combine image-understanding capabilities with any available additional information (in the form of supervision, annotations, user feedback, etc.) to enable sophisticated recognition, parsing, retrieval, classification, indexing, browsing, modeling, and compression of visual content. Strong emphasis is given to (1) statistical formulations that can deal with noise and uncertainty and (2) the search for solutions that are provably optimal under suitable optimality criteria.