News

PolyU Outstanding Students Award 2020

We are glad to announce that Mr Xiaochuan Xu, our final year student of BSc (Hons) in Computing, has received the honour of the “Outstanding Student Award of Department” for his exceptional accomplishments in both academic and non-academic pursuits during his study. Prof. Jin-Guang Teng, President of PolyU, officiated the Outstanding Student Award Presentation Ceremony on 12 March and presented the award certificates to the top undergraduate students. PolyU organises the Outstanding Students Award Scheme annually and it is one of the most prestigious award schemes which is set up to recognise high achievers. Xiaochuan is a self-motivated and hardworking student. His decent academic profile, active involvement in extra-curricular activities and good personal qualities have equipped him to be an all-rounder. He was included several times in the Dean’s Honors List and won numerous competitive scholarships. Besides, he enthusiastically participated in co-curricular activities including outbound exchange to the USA, overseas internship in France, external competitions and community services. Xiaochuan also provided extensive services to the University such as assisting in PolyU Education Information Day, Buddy Programme, Orientation Programme for non-local students and PolyU SOAR Global Youth Leadership Programme as well as serving as the General Secretary for PolyU Chinese Mainland Students’ Association in which his strong leadership skills were well-demonstrated. “In the past four years at COMP, I have gained not only solid academic knowledge in computer science and hands-on experience in using emerging computing technologies but also have acquired a clear vision of my career goal through the communications with the professors and many reaching out opportunities,” Xiaochuan shared. “In the future, I would like to become a prominent system architect working in the world-renowned Internet juggernauts.” Congratulations to Xiaochuan on receiving the honour!

COMP career talk on “Preparing to build a professional journey”

Under the COMP Mentorship Programme 2020/21, an online career talk on “Preparing to build a professional journey” was organised on 5 March. We invited one of our mentors and alumni, Mr Andy Wan, Director and Head of Transformation of AXA Hong Kong and Macau, to share his career journey and the major changes that evolve to his role today. Andy graduated from PolyU in 2000 with a higher diploma in Information Systems and a degree in Computing in 2004. Having worked in two Fortune Global 500 multi-national insurance companies, he has been focusing on the Financial Services Industry for 20 years with experience across various domains like technology, operations, distribution, project management, digital and business transformation in the local office as well as in the regional office. Built his career from the ground up as an IT programmer, Andy began the career talk with the differences between a job and a career. He shared how he stepped on the career ladder from a starter to a leader and how he made his decision when facing choices in his career path. Andy also advised students to enhance both technical and soft skills before graduation as well as the ways of preparing for a job search. Moderated by Dr Henry Chan, Associate Professor and Associate Head of COMP, a panel discussion on “How to prepare for a professional career?” was held after the talk. The attendees obtained practical guidance in the rich and thought-provoking discussion with the mentors. The mentoring activities aim at fostering a strong bond among the mentors and the students, allowing them to learn from the industrial alumni and seek professional advice on personal development.

Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award 2019

We are proud to announce that Dr Ray Yang received the Faculty of Engineering (FENG) Research Grant Achievement Award for 2019 in recognition of his great efforts and contributions in securing external competitive research grants. Dr Yang joined COMP in 2016 and he is currently an Assistant Professor. Dr Yang focuses on the research areas of IoT, Wireless and Backscatter Communication, Mobile Computing, and AI-enabled Wireless Sensing. He has published over 50 research papers and received the Best Paper Award in several international conferences, including IEEE SECON, ACM MobiCom and ACM MobiHoc. Recently, Dr Yang has won the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2020. The Faculty Research Committee has set up FENG Research Grant Achievement Award since 2003 to recognise the outstanding performance of FENG academic staff members in securing external competitive research grants. To be qualified, a staff member must successfully secure three external competitive research grants in 36 months or four external competitive research grants in 60 months, as Principal Investigator/ co-Principal Investigator.

COMP Mentorship Programme 2020/21 Virtual Kick-off

To enhance our students’ holistic learning experience, we have introduced COMP Mentorship Programme 2020/21 in collaboration with the Computing Alumni Association (CAA). On 26 January, a virtual kick-off was held for students to meet and connect with the alumni mentors. Prof. Qing Li, Chair Professor and Head of COMP, kick-started the event with a warm welcome to all participants and he thanked the mentors for their support and contribution. Mr Darron Sun, the Mentorship Coordinator of CAA, gave an introduction to the Mentorship Programme followed by the sharing of each mentor from various sectors including IT, fintech, insurance, government, e-commerce, etc. We also prepared online breakout rooms for students to have different group discussions with their assigned mentors and other mentors to promote cross-industry inspiration. The Mentorship Programme aims at providing COMP students with the opportunity to seek professional advice from the industrial mentors on personal and career development, as well as to gain an understanding of business practices, workplace culture, market trends and prospects in established professions. We hope to encourage our students to plan for their careers, acquire interpersonal skills and broaden their social networks through the mentor-mentee interactions.

PolyU Info Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes

COMP hosted an online info seminar to introduce the Master of Science in Information Technology (MScIT) programme during PolyU Info Day for Taught Postgraduate Programmes on 9 January 2021. Dr Korris Chung, Associate Professor and MSc Scheme Coordinator, together with Dr Daniel Luo, Associate Professor, shared the trend of emerging IT topics including Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Financial Technology with the attendees. Dr Ken Yiu, Associate Professor and MScIT Programme Leader, further illustrated the programme structure, subjects offered, study patterns, admission requirements, etc.  In response to the rapid development of the global IT industry and the huge demand for AI and fintech talents, two streams are introduced in the MScIT programme: “Stream in AI and Big Data” and “Stream in AI and FinTech”. Students enjoy the flexibility to choose their specialisms based on own career goal and study plan. Besides, with the extensive network of COMP MSc alumni, students can acquire both advanced expertise and professional networks that help them scale new heights in their careers. The seminar provided participants with an excellent opportunity to obtain first-hand information about our MSc programme as well as academic advice from COMP faculty members.

COMP undergraduate won a Best Paper Award at IEEE BIBE 2020

Our graduating student, Mr Ho Yin Andy Yuen, won a Best Paper Award under the category of Bioinformatics at the 20th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (IEEE BIBE 2020) with his final year Capstone Project titled “Better Link Prediction for Protein-Protein Interaction Networks”. The objective of this research project is to design better computational techniques for predicting molecular interactions inside biological organisms. Under the supervision of Dr Jesper Jansson, Associate Professor of COMP, Andy specifically chose to work on the Protein-Protein Interaction Networks and used the link prediction technique to predict missing connections of a graph based on its structure. They improved the ability of the current state-of-the-art models in describing the protein interaction networks and further applied it algorithmically to perform link prediction and successfully predicted protein interactions more accurately. Andy thanked Dr Jansson for working with him as the co-author of the paper. He also expressed his deep gratitude for Dr Jansson’s invaluable support and guidance throughout his study and research journey at COMP. Andy is currently a project assistant at the Biomaterial Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering of PolyU. He employs computational techniques to generate and analyse laboratory images and raw data for characterising and elucidating cellular mechanisms. IEEE BIBE 2020 aims at building synergies among the disciplines of Bioinformatics, Bioengineering and Biomedical. The IEEE BIBE series provides a common platform for the cross-fertilization of ideas, and for shaping knowledge and scientific achievements by bridging these disciplines into an interactive and engaging forum.

Prof. Jiannong Cao received 2020 IEEE Computer Society TCCLD Research Innovation Award

We are proud to announce that Prof. Jiannong Cao, Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in Data Science and Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing, has received the 2020 IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Cloud Computing (TCCLD) Research Innovation Award for his contribution in task partition and scheduling in cloud and edge computing. Prof. Cao has joined COMP since 1997. His research interests include Parallel and Distributed Computing, Wireless Networking and Mobile Computing, Big Data and Machine Learning, and Cloud and Edge Computing. In addition to publishing over 700 papers in major international journals and conferences, Prof. Cao has directed and participated in over 90 research and development projects and, as a principal investigator, obtained over HK$60 million grants from national and local funding agencies as well as key technology companies. For his exceptional research efforts, Prof. Cao has also been named Fellow of IEEE, Distinguished Member of ACM, Senior Member of CCF and Member of Academia Europaea. The IEEE TCCLD Research Innovation Award recognises an individual or a group of collaborators for their outstanding technical innovations in the field of cloud computing. The contributors must have a long-term impact on advancing the theory and practice in cloud computing.

Prof. Song Guo is named ACM Distinguished Member

We are proud to announce that Prof. Song Guo, Professor and Associate Head (Research and Development) of COMP, has been named Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Member for Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing.  Prof. Guo has joined COMP since 2016. He is an IEEE Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society. His research interests include Big Data, Edge AI, Mobile Computing, Blockchain and Distributed Systems, and he has published over 500 conference and journal papers among these areas. Prof. Guo is also recognised in the list of Highly Cited Researchers 2020 by Clarivate Analytics for his exceptional research and scientific impact in the field of Computer Science. The ACM Distinguished Member programme recognises up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the computing field. This year, ACM has named 64 Distinguished Members who were selected by their peers for a range of accomplishments that move the computing field forward. These innovators have made contributions in a wide range of technical areas including data science, mobile and pervasive computing, artificial intelligence, computer science education, computer engineering, graphics, cybersecurity, and networking.

Prof. Qing Li and his research team won the Best Research Paper Award at WI-IAT’20

Congratulations to Prof. Qing Li, Chair Professor of Data Science and Head of COMP, and his research team on receiving the Best Research Paper Award at the 2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT '20) with the paper titled “EmoChannelAttn: Exploring Emotional Construction Towards Multi-Class Emotion Classification”. The current multi-class emotion classification studies mainly focus on enhancing word-level and sentence-level semantical and sentimental features by exploiting hand-crafted lexicon dictionaries. In comparison, very limited studies attempt to achieve emotion classification task from the emotion-level perspectives, which are to understand how the emotion of a sentence is constructed. Another limitation of existing works is that people assumed that emotion labels are relatively independent, neglecting the possible relations among different types of emotions. In this paper, the team aims at exploring various fine-grained emotions based on domain knowledge to understand the construction details of emotions and the interconnection among emotions. To address the first issue, the team proposes a novel method named EmoChannel to capture the intensity variation of a particular emotion in time series by incorporating domain knowledge and dimensional sentiment lexicons. The resulting information of 151 available fine-grained emotions is utilised to comprise the sentence-level emotion construction. As for the second issue, the EmoChannelAttn Network is introduced to identify the dependency relationship within all emotions via attention mechanism to enhance emotion classification performance. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method gains significant improvements compared with baseline models on several multi-class datasets. WI-IAT provides a premier forum and features high-quality, original research papers and real-world applications in all theoretical and technology areas that make up the field of Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology.

COMP scholars named Highly Cited Researchers 2020

We are proud to announce that Prof. Song Guo, Professor and Associate Head (Research and Development), and Prof. Lei Zhang, Chair Professor of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, have been recognised in the list of Highly Cited Researchers 2020 by Clarivate Analytics for their exceptional research and scientific impact in the field of Computer Science and Engineering respectively. Prof. Guo conducts research mainly in the areas of Big Data, Edge AI, Mobile Computing, Blockchain and Distributed Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society. Prof. Guo has also served on the editorial board of prestigious international journals. This year is the first time that Prof. Guo being named Highly Cited Researcher. Prof. Zhang is an IEEE Fellow and he has been named Highly Cited Researcher for the sixth consecutive years. His research interests include Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Deep Learning, Image and Video Processing, and he has published more than 275 papers in these areas. According to Google Scholar, his works have been cited more than 56,000 times and hish-index is 116. Clarivate™ Highly Cited Researchers identifies the world's most influential researchers of the past decade, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science™.