News

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.

COMP Student Won Best UI/UX Award at Cathay Hackathon 2022

Our Year 3 student, YU Man-Fai Daniel, won the Best UI/UX Award at Cathay Hackathon 2022 with a project called “Tripify”. As the team leader, Daniel joined hands with three teammates from The University of Hong Kong in creating an app extension for the “Cathay Learn” application. The concept of Tripify is building an ecosystem that not only motivates continuous learning activities by implementing a reward system, but also connects the airline to everyday life of the users. Daniel’s team stood out from a hundred teams and reached the final round. In 24 hours, finalists needed to develop a creative application that could address travel and environmental topics. The organiser, Cathay Pacific, prepared a behind-the-scenes tour for the finalists to deepen their understanding of aviation operations, helping finalists develop the application that fits best in real practice. “Before the competition, we know a little about how technology can be applied to real life. With the instructions and mentoring phase, we learnt to adapt innovative ideas and emerging technologies to building real-life solutions,” Daniel said. Despite the achievement in the end, the team had a bumpy start. Their first project idea was considered unworkable at the beginning of the final. Therefore, they decided to start all over again, but there was only half a day left for the development when their ultimate idea came out. Daniel shared that they cherished every second, clearly divided the tasks and work shifts, and most importantly, worked as a team. The result turns out to be encouraging, all the hard work worthwhile. Cathay Hackathon 2022 was organised on 19 and 20 November 2022 at Cathay City. Local university students who want to disrupt the status quo and drive everlasting impacts gathered at the event and created pioneering technology solutions. A series of activities and mentoring sessions were arranged to boost young techs up.

The 28th Congregation of PolyU

Congratulations to all COMP graduates! The graduation ceremonies of bachelor and master degrees students were successfully concluded on 8 November 2022 at the Jockey Club Auditorium of PolyU. Families and friends of graduates were also invited to join the celebration to share the joy at this memorable moment. In 2022, Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award (OPAA) was introduced to publicly give public recognition to outstanding PolyU graduates for their professional achievements and significant contributions to the community and their alma mater. On the same celebrating occasion, The OPAA Awardees of Faculty who graduated from COMP received their awards from Ir Prof. H.C. MAN, Dean of Faculty of Engineering, accompanied by Prof. LI Qing, Chair Professor and Department Head. The awardees are Dr Abraham LAM and Mr Darron SUN respectively. Dr Lam was also the representative of the OPAA awardees and delivered an inspirational speech to the new graduates. Details of OPAA and the introduction of the awardees can be found from our past news. More photos are available on COMP Facebook page and COMP Instagram.

COMP Scholars won Best Paper Award at ICWL 2022

Knowledge graph (KG) is a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model or topology to integrate data. A number of studies in this area use KGs as peripheral sources of educational materials. A COMP research team proposed a novel framework which employs KGs as a primary tool for instructional design in the paper entitled “Intelligent Instructional Design via Interactive Knowledge Graph Editing”. This paper won the Best Paper Award at the 21st International Conference on Web Based Learning (ICWL 2022). Authors of this paper include CHAN Cheuk Kin Jerry (Research Assistant), WANG Yaowei (PhD Student), Prof. LI Qing, Prof. BACIU George, Prof. CAO Jiannong, Dr HUANG Xiao, Dr LI Chen Richard and Dr NG Hiu Fung Peter. The team see the potential of KG technologies in instructional design and education. They believe that it could be utilized for course planning, teaching performance prediction and study plan personalization. Unfortunately, research on KGs for educational application is at a preliminary stage. To expedite the development of KG technologies for instructional design, an application framework that encourages reciprocal collocation between educators and KG research is proposed in this paper. An included design tool would ease instructors to express their ideas in the form of KG when they are preparing their courses. The provided web platform allows users to manage, share and browse KGs of course design. ICWL is an annual International Conference on Web-based Learning, founded by the Hong Kong Web Society. The 21st ICWL was held from 21 to 23 November 2022 at University of La Laguna,T enerife, Spain. It featured a technical program of refereed papers selected by the international program committee, and keynote addresses offered by eminent scholars.

COMP PhD Candidate received the Best Paper Award at MoMM2022

We are proud to announce that the paper entitled “Curvable Image Markers: Towards a Trackable Marker for Every Surface” won the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia Intelligence (MoMM2022). The first author of the paper is our PhD Candidate, Mr Zackary Ping Tat SIN, and his supervisors are Dr Hong Va LEONG (Associate Professor) and Dr Peter NG (Assistant Professor). This paper proposed adapting fiducial markers for curved surfaces, which aims at enhancing the interaction in Augmented reality (AR). AR possesses great potential for productivity, entertainment and communication, inclusive of the mobile context. Although the strength of AR is the blending of physical and virtual environments, current mobile applications seem to focus only on overlaying the virtual part upon the physical one. It is argued that an important direction to explore is how to enhance the interaction in AR such that physical elements can act upon the virtual ones. ArUco is a popular choice in academia for tracking due to its relatively cheap processing cost and requiring only RGB input, making it also suitable for mobile devices. A fiducial marker like ArUco, however, is flat. To move towards enabling it for uneven surfaces, this paper proposed adapting the markers for curved surfaces to be suitable on bandages for warping around objects for tracking. The process involves curve modeling and content extraction. It also presents an image marker making use of neighborhood features to improve its appeal for AR purposes. MoMM is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all mobile computing and multimedia related areas.