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COMP Research Student Orientation 2020

To get our newly admitted research postgraduate (RPg) students familiar with their studies at PolyU, we organised an orientation session in hybrid mode on 28 October 2020 and it began with a warm welcome by Prof. Qing Li, Chair Professor of Data Science and Head of COMP. Dr Bin Xiao, the Chair of the Departmental Research Committee (DRC) gave an overview of the RPg education and key information such as programme structure and study path. He also highlighted different assistance and services provided by the Department. Prof. Ajay Kumar, Chair of the Departmental Learning & Teaching Committee (DLTC), introduced the responsibilities and ethics as teaching assistants to support the departmental teaching activities. Finally, Mr Wei Zhang from the Postgraduate Research Student Association (PRSA) of COMP shared his study experience and campus life. The orientation not only enabled our new RPg students to have a better understanding of their learning environment and the resources available to them but also offered them an opportunity to meet other fellow students.

Python workshops for COMP MSc students

Co-organised by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Beijing-Hong Kong Academic Exchange Centre, and supported by PolyU’s Department of Computing (COMP) and Peng Cheng Laboratory, the Mainland-Hong Kong Research Forum on the Advances in Cybersecurity was successfully concluded in hybrid mode from 23 to 24 October 2020. The forum brought together over 140 cybersecurity experts to promote security technology for the cyberspace and strengthen the cooperation on scientific research and education. The opening of the forum was officiated by Dr Zhaotian Zhang and Dr Shige Zhan from NSFC; Mr Hoi Shan Hsu from Beijing-Hong Kong Academic Exchange Centre; Prof. Qing Li, Chair Professor of Data Science and Head of COMP, Prof. Hui Zhou from Peng Cheng Laboratory, and Prof. Binxing Fang, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering. Scholars from prominent institutions were invited to discuss a wide range of security issues on different aspects including internet monitoring, blockchain, AI, multimedia, ICS/ IoT, cryptography and cloud computing. Prof. Jiannong Cao, Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing of COMP, shared his view on “Security and Privacy for Blockchain-based Big Data Sharing” while Prof. Song Guo, Professor of COMP, presented his research findings on “Deep Reinforcement Learning Empowered Blockchain: Security Challenges and Solutions”. Besides, there was a panel discussion which further stimulated rich and thought-provoking dialogues among the participants. Panelists engaged in the exploration of cross-region research collaboration; challenges and potential solutions for protecting the data, chips and networks in IoT and industrial control systems; possibility of achieving cryptography-like provable AI security; and difficulties faced by blockchain systems and applications. The two-day forum provided a constructive platform for local and the Mainland academia and researchers to analyse and exchange insightful perspectives on the latest development, challenges and opportunities of cybersecurity.

Prof. Johan Hoorn won Huibregtsen Prize 2020 with his robotics research project ‘Alice’

We are proud to announce that Prof. Johan Hoorn received the Huibregtsen Prize 2020 at the award ceremony that took place on 5 October 2020 in Haarlem, The Netherlands, with a live stream available to the guests. Prof. Hoorn successfully outcompeted other scholars who perform scientific research on different social concerns, including COVID-19 new treatment options, malaria vaccine, adolescent overweight, and nitrogen threats to nature. He shared the honour with Prof. Elly Konijn of Vrije University Amsterdam for their robotics research project ‘Alice’. Social loneliness is a major problem in an ageing society. Prof. Hoorn and Prof. Konijn have therefore developed ‘Alice’, a robot girl that helps to cope with loneliness among older adults. ‘Alice’ is regarded as an electromechanical grandchild. She relieves loneliness and improves the quality of life by being a companion to older adults, chatting with them and responding empathically. Can robot friendship replace the human counterpart in a social relationship? How will people respond to an artificial object while they know it is not a real human being? What does a robot need to understand others and how to show empathy? Which social role should a robot play to counter loneliness among the elderly? How do we make a robot understand social-emotional language instead of just following instructions? These questions also are investigated in the project ‘Alice’. “As is, Alice’s performance is based on a mix of artificial intelligence and remote-controlled human interference when a conversation goes astray. Currently, we work on language understanding rather than processing,” said Prof. Hoorn. “Over time, we hope such robots can be used for many social challenges in healthcare, education, and services.” The special feature of ‘Alice’ is highly recognised by the jury of the Huibregtsen Prize. In the Jury Report, “The jury unanimously opted for an innovative approach with an impressive result. An integral success story. The particularly passionate approach to a pressing problem. An impressive combination of in-depth, fundamental research and application of knowledge with global impact. Teamwork that outside the scientific comfort zone answers questions and raises others. This scientific and social project is based on an impressive combination of disciplinary expertise and raises deep questions about possible relationships between humans and machines, but also about empathy and moral reasoning. ‘Alice’ is the product of team science, which stimulates the social discussion about social robotics with the use of citizen science and the impact on politics and business. Deep fundamental questions, a highly relevant application, and brilliant science communication.” Prof. Hoorn started his research in the humanities, focusing on fictional characters. After he joined the Department of Computer Sciences of Vrije University Amsterdam, he ventured into avatars and game characters. He later turned to social robots as the universal interface between the digital and the analogue world after implementing several cognitive models in artificial systems. At PolyU, Prof. Hoorn furthers the Robot Brain Server, which handles data, data security, artificial intelligence, and cloud access to make the robot a safe and trustworthy confidante to its user. The Huibregtsen Prize was established in 2005 by the board of the Stichting De Avond van Wetenschap & Maatschappij (The Evening of Science & Society Foundation) in The Netherlands and named after Ir. Wouter Huibregtsen. All public organizations for scientific research in The Netherlands are invited to submit entries. A minimum of four and a maximum of six projects are selected to enter the final stage annually and the prize ultimately goes to a recent groundbreaking research project that combines scientific quality and innovation with clear social relevance.

COMP@PolyU Education Info Day 2020

PolyU Education Info Day was successfully concluded online on 10 October 2020. This year, the Department of Computing (COMP) organised different live streaming and virtual activities including info seminar and consultation, virtual booth exhibition and lab tour. Dr Hong-va Leong, our Associate Professor and Associate Head (Teaching & Learning) hosted the info seminar of BSc (Hons) Scheme in Computing with comprehensive information including the programmes on offer, admission requirements, learning opportunities and career prospects. During the real-time consultation session, Dr Leong offered his professional advice on studying at COMP and attendees had a lively interaction with us. To further enable participants to understand more about COMP, we have also prepared a video covering the introduction of our teaching facilities, students’ sharing on learning experiences and the career options illustrated by our alumni. Some exhibition posters which showcase the development of the FinTech & AI profession, COMP graduate employment figures and alumni testimonials, as well as a virtual tour to our Virtual Reality & Game Lab, were also available. The BSc (Hons) Scheme in Computing that we offer includes three major degree programmes – BSc (Hons) in Computing, BSc (Hons) in Enterprise Information Systems, and BSc (Hons) in Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence. These programmes are designed with diversified scopes of curriculum, allowing students to select the most suitable one for themselves in the second year of study after a unique common first year. PolyU Education Info Day is an annual event which provides an excellent platform for the prospective students, their parents and the public to obtain the most up-to-date information on a wide range of academic programmes and to gain useful tips about planning for the university life.

IFTA FinTech Achievement Awards 2019 PolyU Campus Sharing

To further promote the FinTech knowledge to our students and foster the future pillars of the society, the Department of Computing (COMP) and the Institute of Financial Technologists of Asia (IFTA) co-organised the IFTA FinTech Achievement Awards 2019 PolyU Campus Sharing on 24 September 2020. Mr Paul Pong, Chairman of IFTA, officiated the opening of this webinar with Dr Henry Chan, Associate Professor and Associate Head of COMP. They introduced the supports offered by IFTA and their views on the global trend of financial technology. Three IFTA FinTech Achievement Awardees including Mr Bob Lee, Chief Business Officer of BCT Group, Mr Joe Ng, Chief Technology Officer of Centaline Data Technology Limited, and Ms Ivy Tse, Co-founder & Director of FreightAmigo Services Limited, were invited to share their expertise and insight on FinTech in the field of MPF, PropTech and FreightTech respectively. IFTA is the only Certificate in Finance and Technology (CFT) certification body in Asia. It is also a non-profit organisation with a mission and a vision to nurture global FinTech talent with the highest standards of ethics, education, and professional conduct.

Dr Nan Guan received the Best Paper Award in EMSOFT 2020

Congratulations to our Associate Professor, Dr Nan Guan, on receiving the Best Paper Award in the ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) 2020 under the 16thACM/IEEE Embedded Systems Week held from 20 to 25 September 2020 with the paper titled “Efficient Feasibility Analysis for Graph-based Real-Time Task Systems”. Dr Guan’s paper was the only one selected among all EMSOFT accepted papers.   Many real-time systems are safe-critical, so it must be ensured that their run-time behaviours satisfy the pre-specified timing constraints under any circumstances. To provide such guarantees, one must describe the system behaviour with formal models, based on which properties of interest can be proved. It is a well-known trade-off between the expressiveness and the tractability of the models. In this paper, Dr Guan and his team have developed techniques to efficiently analyse DRT, the most expressive real-time task model of which the timing analysis problem remains in the pseudo-polynomial class. Their techniques can improve the efficiency by orders of magnitude in common cases comparing with the state-of-the-art, and thus making the online analysis and iterative analysis of models as expressive as DRT to be feasible. Dr Guan joined COMP in 2015 and his research interests include real-time embedded systems and cyber-physical systems. He received the ACM SIGBED Early Career Researcher Award in 2020, the Best Paper Award in ISORC 2019 and the Outstanding Paper Award in RTSS 2019. Dr Guan has also served on the TPC of RTSS, DAC, RTAS, EMSOFT, ECRTS, LCTES, RTCSA, ASP-DAC in recent years. EMSOFT is one of the three top conferences listed by CSRankings in the field of "Embedded and Real-Time Systems". Since 2001, EMSOFT brings together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and government to advance the science, engineering, and technology of embedded software development.

Dr Ray Yang awarded NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2020

We are pleased to announce that Dr Ray Yang has secured a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Excellent Young Scientists Fund 2020 for his research project titled “Battery-free Internet of Things”. As the fundamental infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT) has developed rapidly in recent years. However, the existing Internet of Things is powered by batteries. Once the nodes run out of power, the whole network is broken down. This project proposes an efficient and battery-free IoT, which can harvest energy from ubiquitous electromagnetic waves for wireless transmission and sensing. 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. The NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund supports young scholars with good achievements to conduct innovative research in the areas of their own choice. It aims at promoting fast growth of creative young talents and fostering a number of outstanding researchers on the frontiers of international science. Media interview: http://m.news.cctv.com/2020/09/24/ARTIlMzMIeqj8DXBVB43mYJ6200924.shtml

COMP PhD students won in the first "Malan Mountain Cup" International Audio & Video Algorithm Competition

Organised by the CPC Hunan Provincial Committee Cyberspace Administration, Hunan Association for Science and Technology, China (Changsha) Malan Mountain Video Cultural and Creative Industrial Park, and Mango TV, the first "Malan Mountain Cup" International Audio & Video Algorithm Competition was successfully concluded on 15 June 2020. It attracted nearly 1300 teams from over 20 countries and regions including China, USA, UK and Australia, to compete on the AI algorithm technologies in 30 days. We are delighted to announce that “ManGoGoGo”, a team consisted of our PhD students Mr Hui Zeng and Mr Xi Yang, together with Mr Hui Xian from DAMO Academy of Alibaba Group, won the Champion under the track of “Image Quality Restoration” in the competition. The team proudly received the honour at the award presentation ceremony held in Changsha, China on 8 September 2020. “We joined the contest because we are very curious about the needs of the industry. Our goal is not just to have the research papers published but also hope that our research work can solve real-world problems,” said Mr Zeng, the team leader. “We have laid a solid foundation through our research studies supervised by Prof. Lei Zhang. The training enabled us to identify a clear direction upon receiving the competition data, allowing us to save much time and effort in completing the tasks.” “ManGoGoGo” solved the challenge of restoring a damaged video to a high definition one by adopting a multi-frame strategy to fully utilize the complementary information among video frames, which could significantly improve the signal to noise ratio. The team designed a network architecture taking large image patches as inputs, facilitating the model to leverage the larger scale of spatial information for a better restoration. They also carefully controlled the model complexity to balance its performance and efficiency. “The prospects in the image quality restoration field are quite broad. Under the national policy of advancing and popularising the 4K ultra high definition technology, the application and demand for image quality restoration are expected to increase greatly. For example, some TV dramas and advertising video products are requiring higher image quality,” another team member Mr Yang shared. “On the other hand, the restoration technique is often used to repair some old data and images, which is also noteworthy for cultural heritage.” The “Malan Mountain Cup” comprises three tracks: Video Specific Point Tracking, Video Recommendations and Image Quality Restoration. The competition aims at building a technology platform for top algorithm talents to demonstrate their innovative ideas and skills of deep learning as well as to explore the future of the film and television industry. Some contents above are extracted and translated from the interview by Toutiao of Mango TV Photo source: Mango TV

Outstanding Student Award 2019/20

We are glad to announce that our final year student of BSc (Hons) in Computing, Mr Shiqi He, has been awarded the “Outstanding Student Award of Department” for his excellent academic performance, active involvement in extra-curricular activities and good personal qualities. The Outstanding Students Award Scheme is one of the most prestigious award schemes at PolyU which is set up to recognise high achievers. Mr He is an all-round student who has exceptional accomplishments in both academic and non-academic pursuits. He was included in the Dean's Honours List and received numerous competitive scholarships. Besides, he enthusiastically participated in co-curricular activities and substantial community services, including outbound exchange to Korea and Japan, international and regional competitions, internship at Microsoft Research Asia and voluntary teaching. He also provided extensive services to the University by assisting in the PolyU Education Information Day and PolyU Orientation Programme for non-local students as well as serving as the IT Secretary for the PolyU Chinese Mainland Student Association in which his leadership was well-demonstrated. “My goal is to become a professional researcher in computer science. Through my 4-year study at COMP, I have acquired a solid foundation in computing knowledge and the skills of cutting-edge technologies,” Mr He shared. “In the age of artificial intelligence, I chose distributed machine learning as the topic for my Capstone Project and I believe this would help to prepare myself for fighting the scientific challenges in the future.” Congratulations to Mr He on receiving the honour!

COMP MScIT Orientation Session 2020

COMP organised an online Orientation Session for all newly admitted taught postgraduates on 5 September with a participation of over 150 students. Dr Korris Chung, Associate Professor and Coordinator of MSc Postgraduate Scheme in Computing, started the Orientation with a warm welcome and an introduction of COMP. A series of information sessions about programme structure, subjects offered and study pattern was conducted by our faculty members including Dr Ken Yiu, Associate Professor and MScIT Programme Leader, and Dr Qixin Wang, Associate Professor and MSc Thesis Coordinator. Other supports such as departmental facilities and access to learning resources were also demonstrated. The Orientation serves as an informative guide for the students to get familiar with the MScIT programme and plan for their studies before the commencement of the semester. Once again, welcome to COMP!