News

Long Service Award 2017

PolyU Long Service Award scheme has been introduced since 1990 to foster a sense of belonging among PolyU staff members. This year, two COMP staff members were awarded in appreciation of their loyal service to the University over the years. On 31 January, Prof. Jiannong Cao, Chair Professor of Distributed and Mobile Computing and Director of University Research Facility in Big Data Analytics, and Dr Grace Ngai, Associate Professor of COMP and Associate Head of Office of Service-Learning, received the awards from Prof. Timothy Tong, President of PolyU, at the presentation ceremony. The ceremony provided a warm gathering for the long-serving staff and an opportunity for the University to publicly acknowledge their years of dedicated service.

Visit to Cyberport Smart-Space FinTech

Beyond classroom teaching, we offered students a taste of “FinTech” by hosting an out-of-the-classroom activity on 31 January. Led by Dr Henry Chan and Dr Dorothy Chau, a group of COMP students made a visit to Cyberport Smart-Space FinTech. Mr Charles Lam, Manager, Partners Team of Cyberport welcomed the group by giving a guided tour to the Smart-Space facilities. That afternoon, representatives from FinTech start-ups were invited to share their experiences with the students. Mr William Lau, Manager of Business Development, Entrepreneurs Team of Cyberport also met the group and introduced their support to entrepreneurship through the Cyberport Incubation Programme. We sincerely thank Cyberport for organising the visit for COMP. Cyberport Smart-Space is one of the largest innovation and technology co-working spaces in Hong Kong which provides flexible work spaces for local start-ups and overseas companies who are looking to scale their business in mainland China and other parts of Asia. Currently, it houses hundreds of companies with diverse business natures, including e-Commerce, IT consultancy, digital marketing and FinTech.

Programming contest for junior students

To provide COMP junior students with more hands-on experiences in programming and enhance their skills and competitiveness, we organised a programming contest for Year 1 and Year 2 students on 27 January at PolyU. Students had to solve as many programming problems as possible within the 3-hour contest. The top three winners were: #1 CHENG Mingrui; #2 LIAO Zhengyun; #3 WU Feijie.

Workshop on Intelligent Chatbot and Scenario Based IoT Solutions Development

To enhance COMP students’ learning experience, a series of extra-curricular training activities will be organised this semester. In mid-January, two thematic workshops were held for COMP Year 2 to Year 4 students, providing them with an overview of application development in enterprise environment and hands-on experience in developing IoT applications with Microsoft Azure Platform. A number of industry experts from Microsoft, Quantr, Buzz IT and AgilePoint were invited to be the trainers and speakers. On 11 January, we hosted an “Intelligent Chatbot Workshop” in which students could acquire practical knowledge of AI, IoT and big data driven solutions and they also had a chance to develop an intelligent chatbot empowered by AgilePoint. Another workshop “Scenario Based IoT Solutions Development” was organised in the same week. Topics related to IoT infrastructure in the market, IoT applications, as well as the design and deployment of predictive maintenance apps were included. The Department aims at providing quality education and we will continue to enrich students’ study context through a variety of teaching and learning activities.

Two COMP academics named IEEE Fellows

We are proud to announce that Dr Ajay Kumar, Associate Professor of COMP and Prof. Lei Zhang, Chair Professor & Associate Head of COMP have recently been elevated to Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with effect from 1 January 2018, for their outstanding achievements and significant contributions in the following respective fields. Dr Ajay Kumar - For contributions to non-contact hand-based biometrics recognition Prof. Lei Zhang - For contributions to sparsity-based image modeling and perceptual image quality assessment Dr Kumar has joined COMP since 2007 and his research interests include Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Biometric Authentication and Recognition, Defect Detection in Textured Materials, and Multimodal Intelligent Interfaces. Dr Kumar’s significant achievement in the development and promotion of biometrics based human identification, particularly the advancement of 2D, 3D and multispectral hand biometrics matching algorithms has also earned him the Fellowship of International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) in 2016. Prof. Zhang joined COMP in 2006. His research interests include Image Restoration, 3D Reconstruction, Image Classification and Face Recognition, Object Detection, Image Quality Assessment and Visual Tracking. Prof. Zhang has published more than 200 papers in those areas and he has been selected as a “Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher” for three consecutive years since 2015. In July 2017, he was promoted to Chair Professor of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, in recognition of his leadership and contribution. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one-percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement. Congratulations to Dr Kumar and Prof. Zhang for receiving this honour!