News

COMP Taster Programme on AI Completed with Success

On 22 April 2023, our department organised an experiential learning programme for secondary school students themed on “Knowledge & Interactions: AI Workshop for Secondary School Students”, more than 50 students completed the whole-day programme. The morning workshop was held at the Solar Tower in Ma Wan Park, where participants received a comprehensive lecture about the knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI). The widespread availability of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has caused heated debate in society. This workshop introduced the perception, communication and content creation ability of AI, guiding participants to rethink the power of AI and the relationship between human and AI surrounded by Solar Tower’s immersive environment, where visitors could recognise the strong tie between human, nature and universe. Participants returned to PolyU campus for an interactive hands-on AI experience after visiting Ma Wan Park. They learnt practical AI knowledge through an interactive model-building competition and competed for awards. Regardless of the competition result, all participants enjoyed a fruitful day, and their understanding of AI have been deepened upon completion of our taster programme. The programme was led by Dr LI Jing, Amelia, our Assistant Professor, who has extensive experience in designing AI-related educational programmes.

Prof. ZHANG Lei ranked 1st in Asia in Best Computer Science Scientists Ranking

We are excited to announce that Prof. ZHANG Lei, Chair Professor of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, has been ranked 1st in Asia and 30th in the world in the Best Computer Science Scientists ranking released by Research.com (formerly named Guide2Research) on 21 March 2023. He outranked 92 leading scientists from China on the top 1000 scientists list. Prof. ZHANG has a high Discipline H-index of 136 and the highest number of publications among the top 1000 scientists. His research interests include image and video processing, computer vision, pattern recognition and biometrics, etc. In 2020, He was also recognised as top 1000 scientists for computer science & electronics by Guide2Research. This edition of the best scientists ranking for the field of Computer Science is based on data consolidated from various data sources including OpenAlex and CrossRef, and 14402 scholars in the field were investigated. The bibliometric data for evaluating the citation-based metrics were collected on 21 Dec 2022.

Industrial Collaborative Paper selected as the Highlight at CVPR 2023

The industrial collaborative paper entitled “Being Comes from Not-being: Open-vocabulary Text-to-Motion Generation with Wordless Training” is selected as a highlight at the IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) 2023. With more than nine thousand of submissions, only the top 2.5% of them are selected as highlights. This paper was the outcome of the collaboration between , Mr LIN Junfan, COMP Research Assistant and the first author of this paper; Prof. CHEN Changwen, our Chair Professor; and other five collaborators from PolyU, Sun Yat-sen University and Huawei Cloud respectively. The project is supported by the funding sponsored from Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd to PolyU.   This paper addresses the emerging and challenging problem of text-to-motion generation, which aims to synthesize motion with the same semantics as the input text. However, due to the lack of diverse labeled training data, most approaches either limit to specific types of text annotations or require online optimizations to cater to the texts during inference at the cost of efficiency and stability.   In this paper, an offline open-vocabulary text-to-motion generation in a zero-shot learning manner that neither requires paired training data nor extra online optimization to adapt for unseen texts is investigated. Inspired by the prompt learning in NLP, the paper pretrains a motion generator that learns to reconstruct the full motion from the masked motion. During inference, instead of changing the motion generator, the method proposed in this paper reformulates the input text into a masked motion as the prompt for the motion generator to ``reconstruct'' the motion. Read the paper here.   CVPR is a premier annual computer vision event since 1985, which is regarded as one of the most important conferences in its field. The conference is highly selective in paper acceptance, and only the papers with the highest impact would be selected by the programme committee as the highlights or for oral presentations. This year, CVPR 2023 will be held from 18 to 22 June at the Vancouver Convention Center in Canada.

Faculty of Engineering Research Grant Achievement Award 2021

We are proud to announce that five COMP academic staff members received the Faculty of Engineering (FENG) Research Grant Achievement Award for 2021. The award goes to Prof. AU Man Ho Allen, Prof. GUO Song, Prof. WANG Dan, Dr LUO Xiapu Daniel and Dr YANG Lei Ray. Their exceptional accomplishment in securing external competitive research grants from 2017 to 2021 returned in triumph. The awarded members are dedicated to diverse research fields, but have also spared no effort to lead and contribute to multidisciplinary research projects. Prof. AU’s research interests include information security, applied cryptography, blockchain technology, and their applications; Prof. GUO focuses on big data, edge AI, mobile computing, and distributed systems; Prof. WANG conducts research on network architecture and QoS, smart building (a big data study) and Industry 4.0; Dr LUO’s research areas include mobile/IoT/system security and privacy, blockchain/smart contract, software engineering, network security and privacy, and internet measurement; Dr YANG studies physical neural networks, battery-free IoT, augmented metaverse, mobile computing, wireless communication and sensing, security and privacy. 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.

Kick-off Ceremony of the Inaugural iOS Club at PolyU

Learning through peer groups is one of the key components of holistic education in PolyU. Not only could a student community foster active learning, but it also encourages positive peer communication. Aiming to congregate future tech talents and develop a global outlook, the inaugural iOS club in PolyU has landed at COMP. The person in charge, Dr Peter NG, our Assistant Professor, will lead seven enthusiastic undergraduate students to organise a series of activities for all PolyU students who are passionate about iOS app development. The club was officially launched at the kick-off ceremony on 20 February 2023. Prof. LI Qing, our Chair Professor and Department Head, cheered for the iOS club in the greeting video. Dr Ng quoted the success stories of COMP and Steve Jobs to motivate members to advance and confront challenges. The club revealed the first-round activities at the ceremony, including sharing sessions by Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scholars and Mobile Application Innovation Contest (MAIC) winners. The club will also arrange Swift coding workshops for members to improve their skills in developing applications in Swift language. All these lead to an ambitious ultimate goal of the club – grasp the opportunity to show PolyU students’ capability at WWDC in the future.

FinTech-AI Undergraduate Students got 2nd runner-up in HKGCC Business Case Competition 2022

Organised by The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC), the HKGCC Business Case Competition links students and businesses for the exchange of ideas. Contestants were required to design creative solutions to crack different business cases in five tracks. Only the best teams from each track had the opportunity to pitch their projects to the panel of judges representing five influential corporates. The duo formed by COMP undergraduate students, AU Lok To Jack and YU Man Fai Daniel, won the 2nd runner-up in the “Chinachem Group” track with their project “Ninaland”. Both of them are year-three students studying BSc in Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence currently. Ninaland is an innovative solution using the non-fungible token technology to promote sustainability and enrich communities, as well as to connect visitors to Nina Park - the first museum-grade fossil garden that will open this Autumn. Jack and Daniel shared that they have gained precious real-life experience from this competition and learnt a lot from the industrial mentors. Their biggest takeaways from the competition were the improved tech mindset and international friendship. Their journey climaxed in their visit to the ChinaChem office where they met their mentors in-person. HKGCC Business Case Competition was an open competition for tertiary students and recent graduates in Hong Kong. Students will learn from veteran business executives and be challenged by a panel of leading industry professionals, which is an experience rarely gained outside the classroom.

Outstanding Paper Award at RTSS 2022

The paper “Bounding the Response Time of DAG Tasks Using Long Paths” received the Outstanding Paper Award at The IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) 2022. HE Qingqiang, our PhD candidate and the first author of the paper; Dr LYU Mingsong, our Research Assistant Professor; and their collaborators (Dr GUAN Nan, Dr JIANG Xu, Prof. CHANG Wanli) published this awarded paper at RTSS 2022. The paper presents a new response time bound for a directed acyclic graph (DAG) task using the total workload and the lengths of multiple long paths of the DAG, instead of the widely-applied longest path developed by Graham in 1969. This new bound theoretically dominates and empirically outperforms Graham's bound. It further extends the proposed approach to multi-DAG task systems. The schedulability test theoretically dominates federated scheduling and outperforms the state-of-the-art by a considerable margin. Read the paper here. RTSS is a premier conference in the field of real-time systems and is a venue for researchers and practitioners to showcase innovations covering all aspects of real-time systems, including theory, design, analysis, implementation, evaluation, and experience.

Call for Nominations: Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Department of Computing 2023

The enhanced three-level Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award (OPAA) introduced last year has achieved great success. The Department of Computing (COMP) is pleased to announce that the new round of departmental OPAA 2023 is now calling for nominations. The submission deadline has been extended to 14 April 2023 (Friday). The departmental OPAA aims to publicly recognise outstanding graduates of COMP for their professional achievements and significant contributions to the community and their alma mater. The departmental awardees will be officially honoured by the department and be nominated for the Faculty Awards or above. Award Categories and Selection Criteria There are four achievement categories, namely “Professional Achievement”, “Entrepreneurial Achievement”, “Scholarly Achievement” and “Community Service Achievement”. Selection is based on the nominee’s accomplishments in his/ her personal achievements in the field, contributions to the community, and support and contributions to PolyU. Special recognition to young alumni awardees in the award category is added. A candidate who is aged under 40 by the end of the award year can be considered under the Outstanding PolyU Young Alumni stream. The Award will be conducted at three levels: Department level, Faculty/School level and University level. The recipients of the Department Award will be nominated for the Faculty Award. All Faculty/School awardees will be considered for the University Award. Eligibility The nominated candidate must be a bona fide graduate who has successfully completed the full-time or part-time programme offered by PolyU (or its forerunners: Hong Kong Government Trade School, Hong Kong Technical College, Hong Kong Polytechnic; and its constituent units: School of Professional Education & Executive Development and Hong Kong Community College) which led to academic award accredited by the respective Institution.   The proposer can be a PolyU graduate, Honorary Graduate, University Fellow, PolyU staff, current PolyU Council and Court member and current Advisory Committee member. There is no limit to the number of nominations to be submitted by each proposer. However, the proposer cannot be the candidate himself/ herself or a direct relative of the candidate.   Nomination and Selection Schedule The nomination form could be downloaded here. Please return the completed form to comp.marketing@polyu.edu.hk with all required supplementary documents on or before 14 April 2023. Panel of Judges and Result Announcement Selection for Department Award will be conducted by end of April 2023. A panel of judges, comprising both internal and external members, will be formed to examine the nominations and assess candidates’ qualifications and performance for the awards. The result will be announced on our website and social media platforms in early May.   Enquiries Department of Computing The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Email: comp.marketing@polyu.edu.hk

Taster Programme 2023 - Knowledge & Interactions: AI Workshop for Secondary School Students

For enrollment, please click here. For enquiry, please contact Global Engagement Office at 3400 3148/ 3400 3149 or local.study@polyu.edu.hk.

Prof. Allen AU and Dr Daniel LUO partner with Cybaverse Academy to lead Hong Kong’s first research laboratory on law and Web3

PolyU and the Cybaverse Academy Limited (Cybaverse Academy) signed a Memorandum of Establishment (MoE) to jointly set up the “PolyU and Cybaverse Academy Joint Lab on Law and Web3” (Joint Lab). Prof. Allen AU Man-ho, our Professor, will be the Director of the Joint Lab. Dr Daniel LUO Xiapu, our Associate Professor, and Mr Paul LI, Managing Director of Cybaverse Academy, will be the Co-Directors of the Joint Lab. On 17 January, witnessed by Prof. Jin-Guang TENG, President of PolyU; Prof. Wing-tak WONG, Deputy President and Provost of PolyU; Mr Johnny MOK SC, Co-founder of Cybaverse Academy; and Dr Winnie TANG, Co-Founder of Cybaverse Academy, the MoE was signed by Prof. Christopher CHAO, Vice President (Research and Innovation) of PolyU, and Mr Paul LI. With the vibrant development of Web3 and blockchain technologies, governments around the world are now acting to provide a facilitating regulatory environment. This Joint Lab will be the first research lab in Hong Kong to focus on the intersection of law and Web3, encompassing the research and development of technological solutions and the exploration of relevant legal and industry standards. PolyU and Cybaverse Academy will collaborate to promote the safety, security and protection of privacy in the areas of Web3 and blockchain. The Joint Lab aims to provide regulators and other stakeholders with essential tools to enhance protection for the investment community and the general public. Details of the MoE signing ceremony are reported in PolyU’s media release.