News

Big Datathon 2018 @ PolyU

Co-organised by PolyU and Radica, “Big Datathon” – an annual hackathon event focusing on the application of big data, data analytics, and data science was successfully held at PolyU on 26 - 27 May. This competition gathered real business challenges and data from real companies for contestants to solve. It attracted over 150 university students, graduates, working professionals and startups. A team of three COMP students (Ka Yu Chan, Tsz Hin Chan and Cheuk Yin Wong) won the PolyU Champion Award with their project “Course Designer”. On the first competition day, 43 teams of 2 to 5 were formed and each team selected one of the business challenges provided by PolyU, Radica and UBS respectively. By using fresh data and advanced tools, participants worked together in 24 hours to solve the data problems or pain points happening in the real business world. The team projects were evaluated by a panel of judges from academia and industry under four key criteria including quality of data crawling, creativity and innovation, demonstration of capability, and communication skills. Ten teams became finalists and competed for the PolyU / Radica / UBS Champion Awards, Best Data Hunter Award, Most Innovative Award and Best Presentation Award. Big Datathon provides a great platform for data talents to put their technical knowledge into practice and on the other hand, for corporates to kick-off their big data projects and access to potential solutions.

Career Networking cum Best Project Award Competition 2018

To help students prepare for their career, COMP organised a Career Networking cum Best Project Award Competition on 9 June. This networking event enabled students to interact with various companies’ representatives and explored different job opportunities. At the same time, among this year’s Final Year Projects, five were shortlisted to compete for Technological Achievement Award, Innovation Award, Outstanding Project Award as well as the Most ‘Liked’ Award. The panel of judge was formed by the executives from Hong Kong Cyberport, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, InfoTech Services and CITIC Telecom International. These industrial leaders not only shared the market trends and expectation from employers but also tips on career planning and interview skills. Awardee Award CHEUNG Sin Hang Technological Achievement Award and Most 'Liked' Award LEUNG Ka Cheong Innovation Award MA Mingyu Outstanding Project Award and Most 'Liked' Award      

COMP Annual Research Day 2018

Building on the success of previous years, the Department and the Postgraduate Research Student Association (PRSA) of Computing jointly organised the seventh COMP Annual Research Day (CARD) with the theme of “Smart Robotics in FinTech” at PolyU on 8 June. Prof. Qin Lu, Professor and Interim Head of COMP officiated at the opening. To encourage cross-area collaboration, students with different research background and areas formed 16 groups of 4 - 5 to work together. Each group had to identify important research problems, proposed innovative solutions and presented their work to a panel of judges. Based on the significance of the problems, novelty and impact of solutions as well as presentation skills, the Best Proposal Awards went to three teams with the highest scores. That afternoon, Dr Zhen Cao, Principle Engineer of Huawei Technologies, was invited to deliver a speech on “Introduction to Central Software Institute – Navigating the Future of Software” as well as to share his insights and experiences with the participants. CARD is an important annual event to share research achievement and promote collaboration among COMP research students, research personnel and staff members. We look forward to more prominent and innovative research in COMP. Awards Awardees Title of Proposal First Place LU Xingye HAN Lei YU Xinbo HOU Ningning Fin-eco: A Reliable, Efficient and Intelligent Finance Eco-system Second Place LI Yanran LI Zhe LU Zexin WANG Fang ZHANG Yinyan Humanoid Financial Assistant Robot Third Place HO Yik Him YIP Hiu Fai SIN Ping Tat Personal Expense Robo-Advisor  

ICMA workshop on Strategic Cost Management

Under the “Joint COMP/ ICMA Affiliate Membership Scheme”, ICMA offered a two-day workshop on “Strategic Cost Management” to COMP students on 2 – 3 June. Mr Melvin Beh, Executive Director of Malaysia Development of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants, Australia, who has over 20 years of international industrial and practical experience in management accounting, policies and standard operation procedures (“SOPs”) development, financial analysis and business modeling gained from different industries including logistics, sports and entertainment, information technology, and venture capital investment was invited as the workshop trainer. The course covered the complex modern industrial organizations within which various facets of decision-making and controlling operations take place and some major contemporary issues that have emerged in managerial accounting were also discussed. It brought new business insight to our computer science students and equipped them with more industrial knowledge in the business field.

PolyU JUPAS Consultation Day: Admissions Strategies 2018

PolyU JUPAS Consultation Day 2018 was successfully concluded at PolyU campus on 19 May. To provide admission strategies and more programme information to the JUPAS applicants, COMP arranged an Info Seminar on Broad Discipline of Computing, which attracted more than 130 participants. A series of Mini-Lectures themed on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Cyber Security, Virtual reality (VR) and Game Development were also organised. By the end of the day, a consultation session was held for applicants to interact with our academic staff and know more about the entrance requirements, curriculum and programme characteristics.

The fifth edition of Computer App Programming (CAP) Day

COMP and the Hong Kong Association for Computer Education (HKACE) jointly organised the fifth edition of Computer App Programming (CAP) Day at PolyU. CAP Day is an annual competition that targets at secondary school students, creating a great platform for them to develop computational and programming knowledge, enhance logical thinking skills, nurture creativity as well as increase team spirit. This year, the preliminary round of “Problem-solving Competition” was held on 11 May, attracted over 140 students from 23 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Prof. Qin Lu, Professor and Interim Head of COMP met the students and gave them big encouragement. All participants had to complete a multiple-choice question paper about basic programming and logical thinking within an hour. The 100 students who scored the highest will enter the final of CAP Day held in July.

COMP Chair Professor Lei Zhang received The Best Partner Award from Alibaba Group

Prof. Lei Zhang, Chair Professor and Associate Head of COMP, was presented with The Best Partner Award in Alibaba-Academic Collaboration at the Alibaba Annual Research Collaboration Summit on 21 April, in recognition of his contribution in building up solid collaborative research with Alibaba AI central R&D organization where the technology developed was successfully applied in Alibaba’s “City Brain” Initiatives. Congratulations to Prof. Zhang! We look forward to more great achievements in the future.

COMP student team won a Silver Medal in the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva

We are glad to announce that our student, Mr Andy Lam and his teammate, Miss Connie Yau from the School of Nursing, won a Silver Medal with their project titled “Clinic Express” at the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva from 11 - 15 April 2018 in Switzerland. “Clinic Express” is a mobile app aimed to ease the pressure on public healthcare system by making use of technology to create a better acute care environment for the patients. It is a patient companion with various functions such as AI pre-triage system, consultation system, instant online medical services booking services and public education. It could help in pre-triage stage, allowing bypass of non-urgent cases to private medical services, as well as making suggestions for the benefit of urgent patients in need. The International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva is under the patronage of the Swiss Federal Government, the State, the City of Geneva and of the World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO. It is now acknowledged as the most important exhibition of inventions anywhere today with over 1000 inventions and products showcased.

Best Paper Award at INFOCOM 2018

Congratulations! Dr Daniel Luo, Assistant Professor of COMP and his research team received a Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2018 for their paper titled “Understanding Ethereum via Graph Analysis”. Being the largest blockchain with the capability of executing smart contracts, Ethereum has attracted wide attention and its market capitalisation has reached USD56 billion. Moreover, around 600K smart contracts have been deployed to Ethereum. Unfortunately, little is known about the characteristics of its users, smart contracts, and the relationships among them. In this paper, Dr Luo and his research team conducted the first systematic study on Ethereum by leveraging graph analysis to characterise three major activities on Ethereum, namely money transfer, smart contract creation, and smart contract invocation. A new approach was designed to collect all transaction data and some new observations were discovered. New approaches were also proposed based on cross-graph analysis to address two security issues in Ethereum. IEEE INFOCOM is a top ranked conference on networking in the research community. It solicits research papers describing significant and innovative research contributions to the field of computer and data communications networks. Out of 1606 submissions this year, only three papers were selected as the best papers.

Hong Kong ICT Awards 2018

Steered by Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, theHong Kong ICT Awards (HKICTA) 2018 was organised by eight selected local industry associations and professional bodies. With the developed innovative information and communications technology (ICT) products, applications and business solutions, HKICTA participants competed for the top accolades in eight award categories: Smart Business Award, Digital Entertainment Award, FinTech Award, ICT Startup Award, Smart Living Award, Smart People Award, Smart Mobility Award and Student Innovation Award. Our student team which consists of two COMP students and one EIE student, proudly received the Student Innovation (Tertiary or Above) Silver Award with their project “Sense+” at the award presentation ceremony held at the Hong Kong Science Park on 26 March. “Sense+” stands for “See, Explore, Notice and Search with Ears”. It is a computer vision application with comprehensive online information designed for the visually impaired, enhancing their life quality. Equipped with machine-learning based computer vision technology, it could describe scenes, recognise faces, identify banknotes and read out text or books. HKICTA aims at recognising and promoting outstanding ICT inventions, thereby encouraging innovation and excellence among Hong Kong's ICT talents and enterprises in their constant pursuit of creative and better solutions to meet business and social needs.